What are the IPC mechanisms available in the Android OS?

Question

Will any one please tell me what are all the IPC mechanisms that are present in Android.

To my knowledge are:

Intents
Binders

score 95 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 03 '19 at 11:22

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IPC is inter-process communication. It describes the mechanisms used by different types of android components to communicate with one another.

1) Intents are messages which components can send and receive. It is a universal mechanism of passing data between processes. With help of the intents one can start services or activities, invoke broadcast receivers and so on.

2) Bundles are entities of data that is passed through. It is similar to the serialization of an object, but much faster on android. Bundle can be read from intent via the getExtras() method.

3) Binders are the entities which allow activities and services to obtain a reference to another service. It allows not simply sending messages to services but directly invoking methods on them.

edited Mar 03 '19 at 11:22

NirIzr

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answered Apr 21 '11 at 06:31

Vladimir Ivanov

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and this `universal mechanism` is implemented by the means of ...what? (expecting something among the lines of kernel system calls, extensions to java found in dalvik, etc.) – n611x007 Apr 24 '15 at 15:18
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Bundle could be seen as coming with Intent, and don't forget BroadcastReceiver. Here are the words from Android Official Page: "We strongly encourage you to instead use Android system functionality for IPC such as Intent, Binder or Messenger with a Service, and BroadcastReceiver". http://developer.android.com/training/articles/security-tips.html#IPC – Sam003 Jul 10 '15 at 01:13
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Can someone please add examples? Newcomers would understand it faster if there are use cases for each IPC type. – guettli Sep 14 '15 at 09:45
`different types of android components` or different types of Android process? – Yousha Aleayoub Sep 10 '16 at 04:22
Doesn't the "binder" actually bases all mentioned mechanisms in Android? We know Android Binder Framework provides the kernel capability for IPC. – ctk2021 Feb 04 '21 at 20:48

score 40 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 30 '14 at 01:46

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There are three types of IPC mechanism in Android:

Intents (along with Bundles)
Binders
ASHMEM (Anonymous Shared Memory) - The main difference between Linux shared memory and this shared memory is, in Linux other processes can't free the shared memory but here if other processes require memory this memory can be freed by Android OS.

edited Sep 30 '14 at 01:46

gonzobrains

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answered May 09 '11 at 09:40

Suman

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Doesnt AIDL come in this ?? – Raa Jun 18 '13 at 09:03
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Binders include AIDL. It's only an language, which helps you generating the Binder Interface for the IPC. – sweisgerber.dev Jul 22 '13 at 10:16
Only uses ASHMEM if you know what you're doing. The compatibility between different android versions is not guaranteed. – David Burström Dec 05 '13 at 18:55
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Should be added UNIX sockets and pipes – aberaud Apr 13 '15 at 17:50
What about Content Providers and Broadcasts? – Mit_ Apr 16 '19 at 07:05

Setu Kumar Basak · Answer 3 · 2020-09-07T17:10:55.100

All the answers are good and concise in this post. But I would like to light upon which IPC mechanism should we use. First of all IPC means Inter Process communication where two applications or processes will communicate with each other by passing some data between them. Since android is meant for embedded and small devices, we should not use serialization for IPC, rather we can use BINDERs which internally uses parcels. Parcel is a sort of light weight serialization by using shared memory concept.

There are many differences between Binder IPC and Serialization IPC:

1. Serialization is very heavy to use in embedded devices, communication will be very slow.

2. Binders uses Parcels to make IPC very fast.

3. Binders internally uses Shared memory concept which uses less memory while sharing data between two processes.

Bottom Line: Binders uses less memory, and quite fast as it uses parcels. Serialization is very heavy, takes time to send and receive data, and also it takes more memory compared to binders.

Note: To pass data between activities, services, and receivers use only Bundles. Don't go for either serialization or binders. Binders are specifically used only for binder services where 2 processes will communicate.

Hope this Helps :)

score 22 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 07 '14 at 14:18

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As written on Android Developers page, IPC mechanisms in Android include:

Intents (with Bundles included)
Binders or Messengers with a Service
BroadcastReceivers

answered Feb 07 '14 at 14:18

lomza

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All of them are based on binder IPC. – Xiao-Feng Li May 07 '19 at 00:35

score 6 · Answer 5 · edited Nov 14 '12 at 13:45

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There are three types of the IPC mechanisms:

handler
implementing binder
AIDL

edited Nov 14 '12 at 13:45

NeverHopeless

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answered Sep 17 '12 at 11:50

swap

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handler is not. Messenger is. – John Feb 22 '19 at 06:22

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Jan 29 '21 at 10:28

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Another solution that worked for me was using the Internal files:

https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage#filesInternal

Write from one process, close file, read from another.

answered Jan 29 '21 at 10:28

Raul Lucaciu

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What are the IPC mechanisms available in the Android OS?

6 Answers6

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