Example: Communication between Activity and Service using Messaging

Look at the LocalService example.

Your Service returns an instance of itself to consumers who call onBind. Then you can directly interact with the service, e.g. registering your own listener interface with the service, so that you can get callbacks.

For sending data to a service you can use:

Intent intent = new Intent(getApplicationContext(), YourService.class);
intent.putExtra("SomeData","ItValue");
startService(intent);

And after in service in onStartCommand() get data from intent.

For sending data or event from a service to an application (for one or more activities):

private void sendBroadcastMessage(String intentFilterName, int arg1, String extraKey) {
    Intent intent = new Intent(intentFilterName);
    if (arg1 != -1 && extraKey != null) {
        intent.putExtra(extraKey, arg1);
    }
    sendBroadcast(intent);
}

This method is calling from your service. You can simply send data for your Activity.

private void someTaskInYourService(){

    //For example you downloading from server 1000 files
    for(int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
        Thread.sleep(5000) // 5 seconds. Catch in try-catch block
        sendBroadCastMessage(Events.UPDATE_DOWNLOADING_PROGRESSBAR, i,0,"up_download_progress");
    }

For receiving an event with data, create and register method registerBroadcastReceivers() in your activity:

private void registerBroadcastReceivers(){
    broadcastReceiver = new BroadcastReceiver() {
        @Override
        public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
            int arg1 = intent.getIntExtra("up_download_progress",0);
            progressBar.setProgress(arg1);
        }
    };
    IntentFilter progressfilter = new IntentFilter(Events.UPDATE_DOWNLOADING_PROGRESS);
    registerReceiver(broadcastReceiver,progressfilter);

For sending more data, you can modify method sendBroadcastMessage();. Remember: you must register broadcasts in onResume() & unregister in onStop() methods!

UPDATE

Please don't use my type of communication between Activity & Service. This is the wrong way. For a better experience please use special libs, such us:

1) EventBus from greenrobot

2) Otto from Square Inc

P.S. I'm only using EventBus from greenrobot in my projects,

Note: You don't need to check if your service is running, CheckIfServiceIsRunning(), because bindService() will start it if it isn't running.

Also: if you rotate the phone you don't want it to bindService() again, because onCreate() will be called again. Be sure to define onConfigurationChanged() to prevent this.