Now, let's demonstrate everything we presented in the previous section in practice by augmenting our step counter from Chapter 7, Voice Interactions, Sensors, and Tracking, to be always on. Let's dive right in.
The first thing to do is to update the AndroidManifest.xml file and set up the StepCounterActivity class to have its launchMode set to singleInstance. This is necessary in order to update the screen more than once per minute in ambient mode. Not doing so will cause the AlarmManager class to launch an intent to open a new activity every time the alarm is triggered rather than reusing the same (already active) activity. Here is the snippet from the file:
<activity
android:name=".StepCounterActivity"
android:label="@string/daily_step_count_title"
android:launchMode="singleInstance"
/>
As soon as we launch our step counter, we see a colorful background image and a display showing the number of steps taken so...