IssueTracker

Developers of 3rd party libraries that want to use WorkManager run into the following constraints:

• The default WorkManager set up initializes WorkManager in the main process, but not in other processes (which is important when using work-multiprocess)
• When using work-multiprocess, WorkManager should be initialized and configured with Configuration.Builder.setDefaultProcessName in all processes that use it (otherwise the process running a RemoteWorkerService will reschedule all work on startup, leading to canceling work that was just started and running it later)
• WorkManager can only be configured once per process.
• The WorkManager configuration is done as part of initialization.
• There is no way for 3rd party libraries to automatically contribute to the configuration. If they take over initialization + configuration, this conflicts with what developers might want to do.
• There's is no API to determine if WorkManager is initialized
• Once WorkManager is configured, there's no API to retrieve the configuration, specifically the default process name configuration. A library that defines a RemoteWorkerService running in a separate process should be able to check if WorkManager is initialized (and otherwise do init it) and if it is, the library should check that the default process name is set (and otherwise.. fail / let the developer know?)

There are a few ways all these constraints could be addressed. One approach might be to provide a isInitialized() API as well as getConfiguration() or getDefaultProcessName().

However, I'm not sure that's the best path forward. Multi process is tricky, especially for libraries, because app developers tend to do things in Application.onCreate() without realizing that a library will start a new process and trigger that code in it. Ideally libraries wouldn't have to deal with init / configuration at all, or they would be able to use WorkManager in isolation with a separate configuration from the app configuration (i.e. maybe get a different WorkManager instance that operates differently from the main singleton).