An IntentService is a good candidate for performing scheduled operations that run in the background, independent of an activity. As described in the Android developer reference, IntentService is a base class for services that handle asynchronous requests (expressed as Intents) on demand. Clients send requests through startService (Intent) calls; the service is started as needed and handles each Intent in turn using a worker thread, and stops itself when it runs out of work. You can learn more about IntentService here: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/IntentService.html.