[rmsaksida]

This looks like absolutely the best approach, but there's one thing I don't like about it: communication between IntentServices and the UI thread feels so... wasteful. The sanest way to do it, I think, is keep communication to a minimum, relying solely on the local DB as a source of information. But then every operation you do to fetch remote data immediately results in at least a couple of DB operations (store it, read it) and a ton of serialization. As far as I know, there's no simple way to pass an object from the service to the UI.

[kllrnohj]

> As far as I know, there's no simple way to pass an object from the service to the UI.

They are in the same process, you can communicate between them through all the normal Java mechanisms. For example, your UI can just register & unregister a callback on the service directly in its start/stop methods (or in onVisibilityChanged if you'd rather do this in a View instead)

[rmsaksida]

Oh, that's better then. In documentation they always point you towards using complicated mechanisms for communication, but I suppose that only applies to services running in different processes. Thank you for the clarification.