Why does my Android service get restarted when the process is killed, even though I used START_NOT_STICKY?

Question

Look to this document section: Service lifecycle changes (since 1.6)

updated

after some investigations (have created project, run described command step by step, etc)
i found that code is working exactly as described in “Service lifecycle changes”

what I found:
adb shell am kill com.tavianator.servicerestart kills nothing

(try adb shell , then in shell am kill com.tavianator.servicerestart
You will be faced with error message Error: Unknown command: kill)

so,

run your application,

run adb shell

in shell run ps command

find PID number of Your app

in shell run command kill <app_xx_PID>

where is Your PID number

repeat killing steps for service (if it is running in its own process)

check if service is running (should not), restarted after 5-7 sec

update

one solution (not enough good, but usable in some cases) is stopSelf() e.g.:

@Override
public int onStartCommand(Intent intent, int flags, int startId) {
    Toast.makeText(this, "onStartCommand", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
    stopSelf();
    return START_NOT_STICKY;
}

update

updated solution

void writeState(int state) {
    Editor editor = getSharedPreferences("serviceStart", MODE_MULTI_PROCESS)
            .edit();
    editor.clear();
    editor.putInt("normalStart", state);
    editor.commit();
}

int getState() {
    return getApplicationContext().getSharedPreferences("serviceStart",
            MODE_MULTI_PROCESS).getInt("normalStart", 1);
}

@Override
public int onStartCommand(Intent intent, int flags, int startId) {
    if (getState() == 0) {
        writeState(1);
        stopSelf();
    } else {
        writeState(0);
        Toast.makeText(this, "onStartCommand", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
    }
    return START_NOT_STICKY;
}

Why service get restrted when the process is killed?

According to this document:

When a service is started, it has a lifecycle that’s independent of
the component that started it and the service can run in the
background indefinitely, even if the component that started it is
destroyed. As such, the service should stop itself when its job is
done by calling stopSelf(), or another component can stop it by
calling stopService().
Caution: It’s important that your
application stops its services when it’s done working, to avoid
wasting system resources and consuming battery power. If necessary,
other components can stop the service by calling stopService(). Even
if you enable binding for the service, you must always stop the
service yourself if it ever received a call to onStartCommand()

from other hand document says:

*START_NOT_STICKY* – If the system kills the service after onStartCommand() returns, do not recreate the service, unless there
are pending intents to deliver. This is the safest option to avoid
running your service when not necessary and when your application can
simply restart any unfinished jobs.

So, after reading this document and some experiments i think system treats manually killed services as unfinished (crashed: @see W/ActivityManager(306): Scheduling restart of crashed service) and restarts it despite of value returned by onStartCommand.

stopSelf() or stopService() – no restarts, why not if job done ?

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