Discussion on: Android Vitals - Why did my process start? 🌄

I have a question about this:
Sometime in the past, Google added a weird new function to start a foreground service ("startForegroundService") , but it seems it should work only if it's not in the foreground, while the previous one should work fine when it's in the foreground ("startService").

I was told that if I want to always choose the correct one, no matter where I start the service, I can just check whether it's in the foreground or not:

val appProcessInfo = ActivityManager.RunningAppProcessInfo()
ActivityManager.getMyMemoryState(appProcessInfo)
(appProcessInfo.importance == IMPORTANCE_FOREGROUND || appProcessInfo.importance == IMPORTANCE_VISIBLE)

This worked in almost all cases, but from time to time, I got crash reports (via Crashlytics) showing that it failed:
"IllegalStateException: Not allowed to start service Intent...app is in background"

How could it be?
For now, I tried using try-catch in this case, and use the other function when this occurs. I hope this will help.