Android home screens enjoy the benefits of the App Widget framework, from displaying pictures to indicating the weather. In our previous articles on the App Widgets (listed in the reference section), we illustrated how to create a simple App Widget which allows for user interaction. Specifically, we built an App Widget that displayed a slideshow of images, where the slideshow controls were made available to the user. In these examples, the slideshow images were sourced locally from the device, but this is not terribly realistic for a real App Widget. Many developers will wish to have their App Widgets display information that is retrieved remotely, for example, from an RSS. Therefore, we now turn our attention to handling some "background processing" in conjunction with an App Widget. In this article, you will learn how to add background downloading of the images by using a Service object. To do this, we will build upon our previous App Widget example.

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