Background
I'm currently developing an application for Android which revolves around an alarm that goes of on an user specified time. My intent for it is that it will be used for waking people up in the morning (and the following morning - aka repeating alarm). When the alarm goes of it will call an
Activity
that has a couple of options (such as snooze). I've got all of this working but I'm running in to a problem.Problem
I'm using
AlarmManager
to handle my alarm needs. There is however something curious going on with the class (in my opinion). There are two adviced ways to handle the setting of the alarm time. Namely setInexactRepeating
and setRepeating
. The problem with these functions are:
setInexactRepeating
is not very accurate. My tests have shown that this gets approximately activated at the specified time, which the documentation indicates, all be it rather vaguely;the alarm will not fire before this time, but there may be a delay of almost an entire alarm interval before the first invocation of the alarm.
My tests show there is usually something of a 5 minute delay. On this answer the user has an average delay of approximately 12 minutes. This won't do, of course, for a system that is supposed to wake people up at their specified times.
setRepeating
does trigger at the specified time. The docs specify however that as of API 19 that all repeating alarms are inexact. Which is exactly what I don't want.As of API 19, all repeating alarms are inexact. Because this method has been available since API 3, your application can safely call it and be assured that it will get similar behavior on both current and older versions of Android.
There is a setExact
method, but this is a bit too specific. Aside from that it does not give me the option to have a certain interval (for repeating the alarm daily). Edit: After trying to go with setExact
I found that this would require me to move up to API 19 (currently on 15), which is something I would like to avoid.
Question
Am I using the wrong class for this system? To me it seems like it should be a legit usage, but reading through the docs has left me wondering. Is there perhaps another class which is better suited for this system?