Android IPC Mechanisms
IPC is a general concept that means inter-process communication.
When it comes to Android, IPC covers the following two situations:
- Communication between applications
- Communication of processes in a multi-process application (Application whose components such as Activity, Service, Receiver, Provider are run in different processes)
In this article, we will create examples of inter-application communication.
There are 3 basic methods used for IPC on Android:
- AIDL
- Messenger
- Broadcast
It is also possible to use traditional Linux techniques (such as socket communication, shared files) to perform IPC. However, official documents recommend choosing one of the three methods specific to Android, which we mentioned above, in terms of security. Advantages such as authenticating the application that wants to communicate are possible in these three methods.
In this article series, we will look into the details of all 3 techniques and how to implement them.
Which method should I use?
If you cannot decide which method to use, you can get help from this chart:
You can find below a detailed explanation and implementation of these methods.
Other parts of the series:
