21 ms·

Android vendors, don’t kill my app

• ericflo 8y ago
  An example of this problem is casting shows to Chromecast. Android often kills your app in the background while you're watching, and now your Chromecast controls don't work and you have to reconnect.
  • kadal 8y ago
    This is so annoying! Do you know what needs to be whitelisted?
    • ericflo 8y ago
      I haven't been able to really figure it out, to be honest.
• loriverkutya 8y ago
  > Smartphones are turning back into dumbphones. We have to fight back! Actually, it is not a bad thing.
• eps 8y ago
  The site lacks proper technical explanation of what the problem is exactly.
  • kawsper 8y ago
    This sheds a bit more light on it, whilst still being non-technical: https://dontkillmyapp.com/problem/ https://dontkillmyapp.com/problem/ It seems to be that these vendors ship builds of Android with aggressive battery-optimized defaults that breaks applications that rely on being able to run in the background.
    • dbrgn 8y ago
      Not just long-running background processes (e.g. gemerating a backup of your app). It may even prevent your push notification handler from running.
      • barrkel 8y ago
        Most push notifications are spam, and even when they aren't, they are usually from self-important apps that think they are the most important thing running on your phone. The only push notifications I want are messages from humans.
        • dbrgn 8y ago
          See - messengers use push notifications to let you know about messages from humans. Most users of messengers get (understandably) upset if they don't receive notifications for incoming messages. Note that you can always block notifications for apps you chose. The problem here is the other way around: You do want notifications, but even though you disable battery optimizations and some other things for the app you're using you can't get push notifications to be delivered reliably. That's a pain.
  • lultimouomo 8y ago
    If you click on a brand you get more detail, e.g.: https://dontkillmyapp.com/nokia https://dontkillmyapp.com/nokia
• xupybd 8y ago
  I actually like the move to kill background tasks. Don't get me wrong I think they're great when they're needed. But if I only installed the app because the mobile site is crippled I don't want it to destroy my battery polling for content changes when I only open the app once in a blue moon.
  • me551ah 8y ago
    Killing background tasks is great and Android does that automatically to save battery usage. But these manufacturers have implemented their own functionality on top of Android which cripples even critical messaging applications like WhatsApp, Slack, Gmail by not delivering Instant Messages notifications instantly.
    • trsfgbb 8y ago
      Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 Pro even kills Google Maps navigation after few minutes (with screen on). I have to use MAPS.ME, it doesn't kill it.
    • daveFNbuck 8y ago
      I don't want Slack or Gmail to deliver notifications instantly. I'd love to have functionality that saves battery by delaying them.
      • me551ah 8y ago
        Get one of the phones listed in the link. Xiaomi is brilliant in this regard !
        • daveFNbuck 8y ago
          Does it allow the user to configure the delays per app?
      • scarejunba 8y ago
        Both these apps allow you to do that in-app. I have Gmail not notify me for work emails and notify me for stuff on my personal account.
• me551ah 8y ago
  Interestingly though it is possible to remotely detect which users are facing this problem and send them instructions on how to add an app to the device's whitelist. I faced this exact problem in my previous company Flock, and built services to detect and inform users which substantially brought down user complaints. https://hackernoon.com/notifications-in-android-are-horribly-broken-b8dbec63f48a https://hackernoon.com/notifications-in-android-are-horribly...
  • GeneralTspoon 8y ago
    Nice write-up, and interesting idea. But how did you guys deal with the situation where FCM delivers and displays a notification without waking your app up. In that case, if the user dismisses the notification without opening it, then it will count as delivered by FCM, but not as delivered by your app, right? Which isn’t actually the case.
    • me551ah 8y ago
      What we observed was that in cases of devices like xiaomi and oneplus, the app goes into a state of being force killed. So even if the notification sent is one without a data payload ( in which case the app is not woken up ) , the notification will not be displayed to the user. To get around this issue we sent all messages with a data payload to ensure that the app is woken up(or atleast the system tries to wake it up).
• silversmith 8y ago
  I haven't followed the scene closely, but isn't it the same behavior as Apple? Can you even do background tasks in iOS?
  • Mailtemi 8y ago
    The apps are not allowed to do background process. But can register a callback to be called when is in background. But there is no guarantee it will be called for sure.
    • guzik 8y ago
      For some cases, there is a 100% guarantee, especially for Bluetooth. I think we never lost a >sample< in the background so far (where I can't say the same for the Android).
  • rjzzleep 8y ago
    Apple is actually more aggressive in terms of what's allowed in the background AFAIR. But they have an arguably better push notification system which seems to use less battery and work better with sleeping apps.
  • toast0 8y ago
    In iOS, you have a few narrow cases where you're allowed to run in the background; some of which are specified to only maybe run. In Android, you're technically allowed to run whenever you feel like it, but starting with Android 6, Google started limits, but I don't think apps get much feedback about when they might run, or if they can access the network when they do run. And the multitude of OEMs that are all dieing to make their product stick out means it's really a crapshoot; some oems were trying to do this before Google's release of the feature, some enable Google's version, but very aggressively, etc. I understand the intent of these features, but there really needs to be a better way. Some apps do real, useful, work in the background, and it's not great for users when that can't happen. Many apps should probably only run when they're in the foreground. Either way, the app should be informed, so it can do the best it can, including informing users why it's not working and being able to direct users to where they can fix it, if desired.
• Kiro 8y ago
  Custom alarm clocks and health trackers work fine on my OnePlus. What is the problem exactly?
  • nallerooth 8y ago
    I had problems with synchronization between my OnePlus 3 and my Fitbit tracker (it'd work fine for an hour or a day and then just stop), but those problems went away when I upgraded to a OnePlus 6T. Regarding slack notifications and similar things, all I can say is that they sometimes appear a few seconds later than on my active desktop, but I don't find that delay to be a problem.
    • SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
      I had problems with my FitBit and other Bluetooth devices on my OP3 running stock firmware but these have all been resolved since I moved to LineageOS. Battery life seems better too (although I haven't explicitly measured).
  • guzik 8y ago
    We are encountering tremendous problems with OnePlus while keeping up the Bluetooth connection in the background with our Heath Tracker. Seems it might be related to the situation described in the linked page by OP.
• dingo_bat 8y ago
  Don't drain my battery - Hey Android devs, don't drain my battery when I'm not running your app.
• 15characterslon 8y ago
  tl;dr The author would like to run his app in the background without notifying the user about it, because otherwise the author would just add add an ongoing notification, which would allow the app to run in the background forever on all platforms.
  • lultimouomo 8y ago
    I'm not sure this is the case, the website talks about propietary "battery savers", not about the standard Android one. I find it completely possible that they kill apps regardless of ongoing notifications.
  • hirsin 8y ago
    I wouldn't necessarily ascribe anything shady here (which I got a bit of from your comment, if that was intended). I found this helpful in debugging an issue I've had with my OnePlus - namely, many apps that I'd like to get notifications from abruptly stop getting them after a while, and I have to reopen them to get notifications. Today alone I had to manually open Facebook Messenger and Venmo in order to get notifications from them - this seriously degrades the functionality of those apps since opening Messenger multiple times a day still isn't apparently sufficient to exempt it from being "optimized".
  • boudin 8y ago
    Not really no. It's more problematic, a good amount of vendors doesn't allow applications to run in the background and it's not a matter of notifications. It's a big issue with IM apps like Conversations or calendars and contacts synchronisation apps like DAVx5 Some example: https://github.com/siacs/Conversations/issues/2771 https://github.com/siacs/Conversations/issues/2771
  • chrismorgan 8y ago
    There is much scope for abuse if things are relaxed, but all kinds of very serious use cases become somewhere in between “very difficult and/or unreliable” and “impossible” due to these techniques. For example: email clients, chat clients, calendars, even alarms sometimes. The first affected things tend to be synchronisation jobs, but it’s distressingly common for these systems to break things so that notifications just mysteriously stop working outright—with no diagnostics of any form for user or developer. Or how about emergency notifications? I live out in a rural area and it’s bushfire season; I want the VicEmergency app’s notifications pronto so that, if a threatening fire starts nearby I can get out quick.
• salex89 8y ago
  Only issue I have on my OnePlus 3T is Slack. I'm constantly missing or getting late notifications. And I tried fixing the issues with their support, but it didn't lead anywhere. They tried their best, but I can't blame the phone vendor because I have a dozen more apps with notifications, services and whatnot running quite well. I've been out of Android app development for some time, but I hang out with a few Android developers, they usually have most of the issues with Samsung, they say that there are often some quirks that have to overcome. That mostly corresponds to my outdated experience.
  • tuukkah 8y ago
    Whether it's an Android issue or specific to OnePlus, I've noticed I have to reconfigure Slack as a "non-battery-optimised" app after each app update. EDIT: More info on the subpage: "To avoid the system to automatically revert the not optimized setting, you must also lock the app into the ‘Recent App’ list." https://dontkillmyapp.com/oneplus https://dontkillmyapp.com/oneplus
  • Plasmoid2000ad 8y ago
    It also for me explains a lot about about the problems I've had with Fitbit notifications. They use an always running background task, and have a long list of troubleshooting steps to disable/re-enable the service repeatedly and after every Fitbit app update. Makese sense no since I have a Oneplus.
• maxmunzel 8y ago
  I don’t see their problem with Sony’s stamina mode: The UI makes it very clear if you have it enabled, it explicitly tells you what it does and I never missed anything because of it. If you keep your phone on silent you don’t care if it delays fetching messages until you actually turn on your screen anyway...
  • zapzupnz 8y ago
    > If you keep your phone on silent you don't care if it delays fetching messages until you actually turn on your screen anyway... That doesn't follow. All I want is my phone to be quiet; I don't stop caring about timely notifications because of this. Also, just because my phone is on silent doesn't mean vibration is turned off and, in the case of my iPhone, the notifications go to my Apple Watch.
  • blensor 8y ago
    If your phone is silent it still blinks the message indicator led when something has arrived. My phone is almost always silent because of our dogs, but I have it lying on my desk and see when something has arrived due to the blinking indicator.
• known 8y ago
  Find, lock, or erase a lost Android Phone https://www.google.com/search?Android+Device+Manager https://www.google.com/search?Android+Device+Manager
• edoo 8y ago
  I only looked at Nokia but it shows an embarrassing solution to the problem of users not having enough control over their phones. It should be effortless for users to control what apps can run and how much power they can use in the background. It is time for the vendor neutral cell sized tablet with only a data module to avoid the draconian telecom monopoly protection regulations.
• npunt 8y ago
  See also this post about notifications delivery interruptions on Android and how to fix it: https://onesignal.com/blog/manufacturers-interfere-with-reliable-notifications/ https://onesignal.com/blog/manufacturers-interfere-with-reli...
• _pmf_ 8y ago
  I watch the evolution (and evolution is the right word here, given the complete lack of intelligent design) of Android APIs with a kind of morbid fascination; a ritual dance between inept API designers with the foresight of a two year old spotting an ice cream vendor across a busy street and app developers who (driven by management) have to buy into the fact that their life saving and community transforming app (CRUD app for ordering fast food or something like that) must support 34 kinds of real time notifications.
• kijin 8y ago
  The default mail app on my recent-ish Samsung flagship phone notifies me of new email anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 hour late. I used to depend on K9 Mail for business on the go, but it was even worse: notifications were often several hours late. Android was dropping the IMAP connection and not allowing the app to reconnect for a routine poll. There doesn't seem to be any general-purpose email app on Android that can actually notify me at a reasonable interval (less than 10 minutes, if not immediately). Even after disabling every power-saving feature I could find, Samsung is still killing and crippling their own default app. I understand that it takes a bit of battery to poll an IMAP server every few minutes. But if I want an app to be able to poll an IMAP server in the background at the cost of having to charge my phone a little more often, that's my choice. Besides, my old phone didn't have this problem and its battery still lasted a whole day. What's even more infuriating is that the phone allows preinstalled social networking apps that I don't even use to continue running in the background while it happily kills the apps I actually need.
  • mcv 8y ago
    I got weirder behaviour from the stock Android email app: I discovered it's sending emails weeks late. When I discovered this, I found one email that was several months old lingering in my outbox. Probably not related to this, but still incredibly weird, not to mention seriously broken.
  • londons_explore 8y ago
    The social media apps will almost certainly use Googles push notification service, which is the only background notification allowed. Your imap client is trying to hold a TCP connection open to your server, which isn't allowed. There's a good reason the phone doesn't allow that. Firstly, the push notification service can be waiting for a notification for an app while the app is entirely unloaded from RAM. Hundreds of apps can be listening for notifications at once, with no system resource overhead. Secondly, imagine every app wanted to have a TCP connection open to it's own server. TCP must generally go through your wifi/3g providers NAT. That NAT gateway will drop idle connections, with the rules on which connections are dropped varying for every type of router and provider. In general, if you want reliable delivery, you're going to have to send some packet down a TCP connection every 5 minutes, although some providers it can be up to every 3 hours. If every app applies it's own heuristics to figure out how often to send a keep-alive message, and you have hundreds of listening apps each with their own connection, and no synchronisation between them, your phone will end up waking up every few seconds for some app to send a keep-alive. Instead, Google keeps open just one connection. They have a serverside database of all network providers to know which ones drop connections when (BTW, this is a big advantage of using your cable providers default modem. If you have your own modem, this mechanism won't be accurate). It can then wake up and send just one keep-alive at the exact correct time. From the server side, Google can batch messages to clients. It can decide that receiving 8 new marketing emails is important enough to sync to your phone, but only if the phone will be waking up for some other reason. Then when a snapchat message comes in, both the mail app and snapchat will be notified by a single wakeup of the phone. Overall, it's a very good design. There are only 2 big downsides: 1) It's centralized. Nobody else can run a notification server. They have a monopoly on delivering notifications. 2) Their server isn't very good. It doesn't have the capability for example to simultaneously listen on 3G and wifi. It sometimes gets overloaded and unnecessarily delays messages. Their database of network providers is sometimes a bit off, meaning your phone is sending keep-alives every 30 minutes, while the connection times out after 20 minutes, meaning there is a 33% chance your message will get delayed by up to 10 mins.
• mosselman 8y ago
  First I though "Is Nokia bad or good? Then I saw 'bad vendor score'" so I figured they are the worst. Then I got confused about all the vendors having the same score, but a different colour. Then I saw that some of the circles are slightly darker than the others... This type of visual communication hurts my brain too much.
  • tass 8y ago
    I think it's a delay loading the images - it's scored by poo emojis. It took a few seconds for that to be visible when I visited the page, initially only showing as large dots.
  • kalleboo 8y ago
    Something on your end is not loading (JavaScript off?) Each vendor has 1-5 poop emojis with Nokia having 5 and Stock Android only 1
    • mosselman 8y ago
      Thanks, yep, I ad-block external domains by default.
  • Yizahi 8y ago
    It seems that just as bad apps they are trying to shield their website is also badly written and the simple picture of poop is linked from whatever of the 7 third-party sites with spying javascript code they are using and is blocked by adblock. Circles for me too.
    • mosselman 8y ago
      Ah that explains it. I was under the impression that I was looking at a simple website, not some super fancy front-end application. I block all external domains with ublock-origin. Since when do you need to serve emojis from a third party? I thought you can just insert them straight into your HTML. Or is that not cool enough?
• traspler 8y ago
  For me this problem is very real. For example I got my mother a Pocofone F1 (by Xiaomi). Everything works fine, WhatsApp notifications arrive but there are some apps which just get crushed by Xiaomi's battery saver. Audible's lock-screen widget for example just does not show up unless you enable/disable 2-3 battery saving and notification settings after installing the app. I think this incantation can't be expected even from advanced users. Normal users will just give up and live with terrible UX, complain to the dev or switch to another app. The same goes for fitbit, getting it to sync in the background involves a similar mixture of battery saving and notification settings which are labeled in a way that noone would dare to change them or have questionable defaults. None of this was an issue on the Nexus 5X. To me it looks like Xiaomi has a whitelist of apps which get special defaults when installing so they work fine while others which are not on this whitelist don't get this treatment. I can understand the benefits of aggressive battery saving especially as there are apps which behave badly but the state it has come to now is terrible UX and is just another frustration instead if actually delivering a benefit to the user. This seems to me like "optimisation" for the sake of benchmarks and marketing claims.
  • simonh 8y ago
    If they didn't do this sort of aggressive system management, I'm wondering what the negative effects would be for them as a brand. I doubt it would be about benchmarks, those are generally done on clean systems at least for review purposes. Likewise Marketing is mainly about features. I suppose it must be genuinely about the user experience and brand perception by device owners. If the phone slows down and the battery drains fast users will blame the phone manufacturer, while if apps crash or app features don't work users will blame the app vendor even though the reality in both cases would be the other way around.
  • yiyus 8y ago
    Go to the developers settings and turn off MIUI optimization. That's the only setting that worked for me. No more killed bg apps.
  • jeswin 8y ago
    The first thing I do on any Xiaomi phone is to install Lineage OS - because MIUI is just unusable for me. Lineage 16 release for Poco F1 is very stable although it's not an official release yet.
• sudhirj 8y ago
  This is the Android multitasking lead finally coming fully circle. Android had multi tasking much earlier and in a more powerful way by allowing apps to start their own serivices and do pretty much whatever they wanted, but this is the unfortunate logical result - apps that agressively kill other apps, installed by the handset manufacturers, to protect users from badly written apps that drain the battery in the services. Apple took a lot of flak for not having multitasking, but to they credit they took the time to build explicit APIs that allowed apps to handoff certain whitelisted tasks (audio playback, downloads, alarms, notifications) to the OS, and made clear guarantees about the circumstances under which the APIs would work.
  • raxxorrax 8y ago
    I think the locked environments we have on phones is the reason we see a lot of trash apps. You don't have this development on more open platforms. At least no to that degree. So both, Apple and Google are at fault here. It is not the API, it is not threading capabilities. Just shitty and locked environments. So define as many additional rules as you like. Won't change much.
    • tass 8y ago
      What is a trash app by your definition?
    • squarefoot 8y ago
      The locked environment may prevent users from removing branded crapware installed by vendors, but it's not its cause. Popularity is. If Gentoo Linux (just to name one we wouldn't expect Joe User to know) became popular as Android on cellphones, we would see in no time vendors trying to cram their crapware into every platform running Gentoo as well, but its open nature would allow users to remove unwanted stuff, so vendors would use any tactic to make it less open in order to force users to run their crap, get more brand exposition, steal personal data etc.
      • simonh 8y ago
        Right, so 'open' Gentoo would get forked into a hundred locked down, obfuscated, proprietary flavours with all the same problems. In fact it's only a closed system with a single gatekeeper that can avoid this problem at scale, because it's the only way to maintain clear lines of responsibility.
• RangerScience 8y ago
  I'm confused. Is this something that occurs all the time, or only when I turn on Battery Saver? Because I love Battery Saver mode. Unless you're a communications app (messaging, phone, email) I don't need your app running when I'm not actively using it.
  • londons_explore 8y ago
    Most brands of phone do this all the time, and do it even more aggressively in battery saver mode.
• amelius 8y ago
  Just please give me plain Linux ...
  • kkarakk 8y ago
    help my wifi driver isn't working on latest build of cyanogenmod /s you may get linux on your hardware but goodluck getting hardware vendors to support linux even on a supposedly "linux compatible" device in any way
  • skvark 8y ago
    There is Sailfish OS (https://sailfishos.org/ https://sailfishos.org/). It's a GNU/Linux and has true multitasking.
    • amelius 8y ago
      Yes, the problem is finding a good phone that supports it.
• perlgeek 8y ago
  https://dontkillmyapp.com/samsung https://dontkillmyapp.com/samsung > Yes, even Samsung - a dominant vendor in the Android market - is using nasty battery saving technique which may kill background processes and render alarm clocks useless. See below for workarounds. Wait, do you really need a background task for alarms? (why) isn't there a system-level service to notify and wake up your app at a pre-defined time or interval?
  • expomarker 8y ago
    > (why) isn't there a system-level service to notify and wake up your app at a pre-defined time or interval? there is. But, defining services is extremely easy and so people often just roll their own. Plus, it's academic.
  • seszett 8y ago
    No, you don't need a background task for alarms. There is a JobScheduler API for that. The aggressive battery settings of most vendors only interfere with badly coded apps to begin with, apps that use background tasks when they should be using more appropriate APIs.
    • kkarakk 8y ago
      what the jobscheduler api is supposed to be used for isn't clear in the docs so people tend to default to creating services(the old way of doing background activities) instead.
      • jdietrich 8y ago
        The API docs seem perfectly clear to me. https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/scheduling https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/scheduling
        • kkarakk 8y ago
          https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/android/platform/android-job-scheduler https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/android/platform/an... compare microsoft's documentation of the same thing with google's documentation and you will see where the failing happens. in comparison intentservices(the old way of doing bg tasks recommended by everyone) are documented the same way by both google and microsoft and so that gets used instead.
• kkkaizer 8y ago
  I dont get it? This is the best thing for me. Iam fed up of the notification loop of apps that I have to eventually delete. Thank god for telling me to buy a Nokia next time.
  • detaro 8y ago
    (assuming the claims on the site are correct, since I have no first-hand data on it) You really don't get that some people think apps like alarm clocks, sleep tracking, GPS logging, ... are useful and should be allowed to run if the user chooses them? To me, a phone that can't reliably run an application for a few hours is fairly useless.
    • r3bl 8y ago
      I own a Nokia phone running Pie. My alarms go off just fine (although I vaguely remember it not going off once or twice a few updates ago), my activity tracker works fine[0] and syncs periodically. I don't use GPS constantly. Signal notifications were also delayed a few updates ago, but now everything runs smoothly. I find it a worthy sacrifice to make for a sturdy Android One phone with solid performance and a battery that can last two days on medium usage. My activity tracker lasts weeks without charging (comparable to a Kindle). [0] Worth pointing out that my activity tracker was also developed by Nokia (before they've sold their health division to Withings), so it may receive some special treatment.
      • Zekio 8y ago
        I've never had any issues with alarms not going off either, on my Nokia device running Android P
      • sorenjan 8y ago
        I read a comment on Reddit [0] from a Nokia user that had a large file transfer using Solid Explorer killed twice because he left the phone unattended and the screen shut off. It worked when he kept the screen on. Would you mind testing if background file transfers work as standard and with manual battery optimization whitelisting? [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Nokia/comments/afkuh4/dontkillmyappcom_shames_hmd_because_of_needlessly/edzr6ar/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Nokia/comments/afkuh4/dontkillmyapp...
• dreamcompiler 8y ago
  If they'd just abandon the quest for thinness and put decently-large removable batteries in their phones, it would make crap like this unnessary.
• epaga 8y ago
  I have had SO many problems with my Android version of a background-running app I made. I've even made a PDF guide just like this page for my customers. Glad to see it's "not just me" - hopefully the vendors will start waking up.
• londons_explore 8y ago
  The solution to this should be user experience billing. If your app wants to run a background service which degrades the users battery, you are degrading the user experience for that user, and all the other apps they use. Another app on the same phone which is very power efficient will still not get used if the battery is dead! App developers who use up the phone battery should be required to compensate those who use it sparingly. Google could set up a market for 'milliamp-hours', where each mAh used up by an app is worth $0.00001c. Apps will put money in the pot (subtracted from ad revenue) proportional to how much power they use, and be handed out to all apps based on app usage (how many hours in the foreground for example).
  • pjc50 8y ago
    > Apps will put money in the pot (subtracted from ad revenue) At this point you discover it costs more to render an ad to the user (and especially to download it) than it pays the app developer ...
  • jmiserez 8y ago
    Ehm, no?! I want more control over what runs not less. It's my electricity on my phone, I certainly don't need someone else auctioning it off like my phone is a billboard. Your idea basically means that apps that spam ads can use more power, even if they're used less. And free or paid apps without ads couldn't afford to run at all. How does this help the user?
• kkarakk 8y ago
  android needs to stop being treated as garbage by google. take the reins, full control - monetarily fine OEMs who make their own garbage modifications to the underlying OS and actively harm the user experience. no timely updates? fine. garbage ux reported by vast majority of users? fine. basically re-implement nintendo's seal of approval for games but with the help of crowd-sourced reviews. we have the technology. but no instead we'll probably get fuschia and android will be deprecated lmao
  • scarface74 8y ago
    A lot of the issues are also caused by Google’s poor API design that is not well thought out causing app makers to have to roll their own solutions. Google has no motivation to make sure that the ecosystem is good as long as they can sell ads and collect user data.
• xyzal 8y ago
  To be honest, as a user I really like the implementation of battery saving features of my Sony phone: 1. They are not enabled by default 2. Their settings screen explicitly states what the modes do 3. They can extend battery life significantly The most aggressive mode is called Ultra Stamina, and it works by basically turning the phone into dumbphone mode -- complete without any internet connectivity, calls, SMS and alarm clock only -- and the phone has no problem lasting a week. I use these modes extensively when going backpacking for several days, as I do not have to carry any power banks, which saves precious gramms :) edit: punctuation, grammar
  • z3t4 8y ago
    Interesting. Batteries in smartphones usually have five times more battery capacity then feature phones, it should last over a month!
    • kda26 8y ago
      Smartphones also have 5x more screen to light up, too.
      • AstralStorm 8y ago
        Reminds me of YotaPhone 2 eInk display - pretty crummy, but the Snapdragon 820 device stayed on a week on without additional power saving...
    • zingmars 8y ago
      It depends on how often he uses his phone and where he backpacks. Being in a low-signal environment will eat up a lot of battery even on a feature phone plus having screens 5x bigger than feature phones also lead to more battery usage when being used. My old OnePlus3 which at this point is only used for alarms and has apps set to auto update (doze is on, but battery saver is off) in the background lasts around a month before I have to charge it again.
    • ip26 8y ago
      My old Turbo 2 could, in fact, sleep for a month in airplane mode (with crappy apps removed). However that would quickly drop to about a week with light usage, e.g. connecting to WiFi somewhere to get directions or pull email for the day.
• Apocryphon 8y ago
  Sad that HTC, perhaps the vendor that's worst off on the list, seems to be the least bad actor besides stock Android.
• fsfsdff56sdf 8y ago
  Not sure if the complaint here is simply from developers of badly designed apps? I didn't do much Android development, but last year I had to develop a small app doing a continuous background task. Yes, it is hard to do that in Android (it seems). But you are supposed to use all sorts of other mechanisms that Android provides. Like for an alarm clock, I guess you tell some system service to play the sound and then go back to sleep. The sound keeps playing and your app sleeps (I guess - don't know this particular case). Some things seemed really hard to do, but it is by design, and users really need to be protected from vampiric apps.
• openloop 8y ago
  Aww shucks.
• TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Here's a process management UX I've been asking for ever since Android came out: I want to have a list of all running apps and their background services. I want to be able to put any app/service from this list down, and have it stay down. That is, I want the ability to kill an app and/or their services, and not see them again until next reboot or the next time I launch the app in question. It's not that big of an UX burden, and it would solve a lot of the battery management issues.
• setquk 8y ago
  Is this why the alarm never went off reliably on my Android phone? (iOS user now)
  • Macuyiko 8y ago
    It might be. I never had an issue with this on my previous OnePlus phone (which at least at the time was pretty close to stock Android), but I was stumped to see that the Google Clock alarm was not going off multiple nights (seemingly at random) on my new Huawei phone. Turns out the phone was closing the app in the background due to it running for a long time... huh. Switching the the built-in clock app (it's whitelisted, probably) fixed the issue, though it's not a good user experience. (To note: there is a settings screen to override per-app background closing behavior, but for an alarm clock I don't mind so much which app I end up using.) It is pretty annoying still having the whitelist e.g. VPN apps manually whilst travelling as the phone was closing them constantly.
    • setquk 8y ago
      Interesting. Mine was a Motorola handset. I gave up with Android in the end due to stuff like this. I don't want to have to fight the tech I use to keep it doing what I want it to do.
• erikrothoff 8y ago
  Such a relief to find this! Some of our users use our Android app for very time sensitive notifications. They constantly come to us saying that our apps and push notifications are slow. It always seems to come back to battery saving modes for their specific Android device, and a quick Google and following the top steps never seem to work. This is so very helpful!
• Tade0 8y ago
  Recently I limited the number of background processes on my phone(Galaxy S8) to two. On one hand lag is essentially gone, on the other I usually have to "restart" an app(in the Android sense of the word) if I want it to regain focus. E.g. tabs in Chrome always refresh, which has its downsides.
• ac130kz 8y ago
  Badly written apps make 99% of Google Play, no wonder vendors are trying to resolve it.
• dangerface 8y ago
  If your app is in the background it shouldn't need a load of resources. These resource limits are there to prevent bad developers using all your resources in the background. If you are having issues with this limit you are probably one of these bad developers. Removing the limit is not the solution, writing a better app is.
  • Traster 8y ago
    So how do you propose to write a sleep tracking app that doesn't run a background process for longer than 20 minutes?
    • wor3q 8y ago
      In a way that it has to be explicitly allowed to do so by the user. I don't need an online store app to eat up my phone's battery, and disabling background by default seems to be only option here.
    • scarface74 8y ago
      That’s a solved problem on iOS. iOS itself keeps track of measurements coming from your device even when it’s sleep using the power efficient Mx chip. Applications can then - with user permissions - request the data when needed. This has been the case since 2013. The app doesn’t need to be running in the background.
    • dangerface 8y ago
      I have a Xiaomi and oneplus phone, neither of them have ever closed a background app so I dunno what you are talking about, but if phones are doing that then, yea fair enough thats a problem. The wording in the linked website is talking more specifically about cpu limits, which is how most os manage background resources, whats the problem with that? Sleep tracking is a good example you should use an event system, but developers are lazy and use "while (true) {}", which is my point.
      • hiddentruth 8y ago
        Are fitness tracking apps able to run uninterrupted in your Xiaomi phone? Did you change any relevant settings?
• barrkel 8y ago
  I don't have any issue with applications dying unexpectedly or not receiving expected notifications on my OnePlus. If anything, my gf's Galaxy is much worse in this respect. She doesn't usually get Hangouts notifications until she explicitly launches the app.
• z3t4 8y ago
  This is a kind of "benchmark" optimization. Perceived battery life is a factor when users buy mobile phones. And all it takes is one bad app and one influent user - to kill an entire product, and even a whole brand.
• whouweling 8y ago
  We are running a (very niche) platform + app for people with special needs, where accurate and offline alarms are necessary: this is a big problem for us. I think about 1/3 of all our support requests are about the app being killed in the background on specific phones. The part of the app that does the actual scheduling of the alarms is a big mess with lots of device & API level exceptions. Debugging alarm problems is a nightmare. We often advice users on what phone to buy and tell them to avoid specific brands. Sometimes users even need to buy a new phone to be able to have reliable alarm signals. I understand why manufactures are doing this. But it really degrades the user experiences for our users quite a bit and is a significant cost (in terms of support load + extra development) for us as an app vendor. Really hope that Android 8+ incentive manufactures to just use the standard Android mechanisms: they seems to work quite well in my experience. You can run things in the background, but only if it has a user interaction as a result: i.e an alarm notification. The user can then determine if this is wanted or not directly from the notification itself. Unfortunately it is not much better on the Apple side of things with local push notifications limits.
  • scarface74 8y ago
    Does Android not have the concept of “local notifications” where you can tell the OS to schedule a notification to be sent to the app to wake it up instead of being in the background the whole time?
    • veeti 8y ago
      Yes, and these manufacturer optimizations often break them.
    • richardwhiuk 8y ago
      It does - the one that works properly is https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/AlarmManager#setExactAndAllowWhileIdle(int,%20long,%20android.app.PendingIntent) https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/AlarmMan... However, the implementations of the API are questionable. Some calls to that API on some OEMs device round alarms to the nearest minute, some to the nearest ten minutes.
• yason 8y ago
  Killing apps is a good thing. There have been battery saver programs since the very beginning of early Android versions to kill of connectivity and clean up running apps. When Android now supports some of that natively and vendors too, even more aggressively, this is just responding to users' needs. There is a quite clear usage pattern to support this behaviour: unless I explicitly say so, I don't want apps on their own to "do stuff" no more than I want my Ubuntu to "do stuff" while I'm doing something else. I only want the application to respond when I'm viewing it. On Ubuntu, I always disable stuff like evolution server and automatic indexing after a fresh installation. At least you can do that on Ubuntu, that isn't necessarily always possible on locked-down systems. I'm happy that Android is quite usable these days because of Doze and background task killing.
  • gambiting 8y ago
    I mean sure, but at least give me a way to override it. On my OnePlus 5T running Android Pie, the system will keep killing my VPN client when in sleep mode, even though I have selected that I don't want to optimize it under battery usage. With the VPN client restricting all unprotected access, it means that once the phone goes into sleep, I stop getting all notifications for anything because there is no internet connection. It's very frustrating.
    • kda26 8y ago
      On my phone, if I go to the apps list>tap app I want to run in the background (VPN app for example)>battery>allow background usage. I have a galaxy S9 but there should be the same or similar setting on yours.
      • pedrocx486 8y ago
        It's exactly the same thing he's talking about. The issue here (I also own a OnePlus 5T) is that OnePlus' implementation of memory saving is too agressive and often ignores user configs.
    • Abishek_Muthian 8y ago
• finchisko 8y ago
  I don't understand why manufacturers are trying to solve problem for user. User has power uninstall app that is draining battery or replace it with something else. There is rating and comment section in app store exactly for this. What they could do instead is to display warning that app is using too much battery, but they SHOULD NEVER KILL AN APP. It may sound radical, but only countermeasure we developers have is to block installments of our apps on such devices until moment manufactures stop doing this nasty "optimizations". It's like taking users as hostages, but that exactly what manufacturers are doing as well. PS: for all down voters, I would like to hear from you if you just android user or you've also developed some app (I doubt you did).
  • Jonnax 8y ago
    The user experience is more important than a app developer's need. Users want better battery life. They don't want a app using it up. Feel free to block the installation of your app on devices that you feel unfairly target background apps, they'll just use a different application.
    • finchisko 8y ago
      >Users want better battery life. They don't want a app using it up. Everybody wants better battery life, but also their alarm app to wake them up, or tracking app to record their runs in the background, receive notification when there is new email or im message, etc. And these functionalities get disrupted by excessive battery management (killing apps in the background). Somebody thinking he knows what users want and making decision based on this assumption (without really asking user) is exactly what brought us here. We are not all the same, somebody can have bit different priorities then you.
    • finchisko 8y ago
      >Feel free to block the installation of your app on devices that you feel unfairly target background apps, they'll just use a different application. reply with some devices you just can't find alternative that would work reliably in the background for example. Imagine sport tracker, that needs to record locations even when in background. You cannot just use another app, because any sport app could get killed due excessive power management. Favoring some apps by manufacturers putting them on a whitelist to prevent them from being killed should be considered as unfair practice (potentially illegal).
• envisionint 8y ago
  This is so true.
• EGreg 8y ago
  You need to do this: https://hackernoon.com/notifications-in-android-are-horribly-broken-b8dbec63f48a https://hackernoon.com/notifications-in-android-are-horribly...
• Altheasy 8y ago
  I hate apps that run in background and do not trust it at all, fuck yaah, I like Android when he stop this shitty apps. 99% of times I'll choose not run in background if I asked for it by your app.
• sublupo 8y ago
  Battery saving is needed for apps like WhatsApp. Even after doing a force kill to Whatsapp, a few seconds later, I see that it opened itself. I can't find a way to close WhatsApp and not have it open until I tell it to. The only option I could find (for a non rooted phone) is to use a VPN and route WhatsApp to a non existent address
• fenesiistvan 8y ago
  No mention at all about foreground services. That should fix all these issues.
  • HughIngram 8y ago
    Some manufacturers don't even respect the foregrounding of services! Our app's Service runs in the foreground, and is sometimes killed by the OS, e.g. on Huawei devices. This issue affects spotify too: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Music-stops-play-after-my-android-phone-goes-to-sleep-mode/td-p/16551 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Music-stops-play-af...
• adrianhon 8y ago
  For our Zombies, Run! run tracking/audio adventure app, "battery management" is turning into our most consistent customer complaint, to the point where it's impacting review scores, active users, and probably subscriptions. The result of the changes made by Huawei, OnePlus, Xiaomi, and Samsung mean that our app is killed during runs, and people interpret that as the app crashing. We're trying to figure out the best way of telling users how to change their battery settings (which, for the avoidance of doubt, are usually on by default; and sometimes revert back to default on OS updates); some kind of annoying modal popup in the app before they begin a run, perhaps. What can I say? These Android manufacturers are prioritising numbers they can put on a spec sheet over the end-user experience on entire categories of legitimate fitness and audio apps. We have no recourse and no way to get on their whitelist. Maybe Google could threaten the manufacturers, but that would be a nuclear-level response. Yet another thing third-party app developers have to deal with.
  • Ninn 8y ago
    Would it be possible to detect that the app was killed while engaged in such a situration as yours, i.e. similar how to systemd detects killed apps with a keepalive ping written to the fs while engaged. Then on the next boot explain that you detected this, and guide the user to OP's page? Or is it way more complicated than so?
    • shimfish 8y ago
      Whether this is possible or not is deeply missing the point as well as showing a vital misunderstanding about UX.
      • reificator 8y ago
        > as well as showing a vital misunderstanding about UX The third party controlling your user's experience is forcibly killing your application while it's in use as intended. This somehow means you are misunderstanding UX? People are suggesting ways to detect it and teach the user how to stop it, because they have no automated solution to this problem.
• scoot_718 8y ago
  Fuck your app, Android vendors, please kill background tracking and bullshit.
• EamonnMR 8y ago
  I actually really like the battery optimization feature. I've only needed to turn off battery optimization for one app: Slack, because I need alerts for it at all hours. Every other app manages to get it's alerts through without it and the battery on my OnePlus 6 lasts forever. Sorry app developers but if I have to trade performance for battery in background apps, I'm going to choose battery almost every time.
• f055 8y ago
  You gotta love the developers' schizophrenia where on one hand we go batshit crazy over mass data collection by "malicious" apps, and on the other we fight with passion for the same apps to just run unmonitored in the background and collect. "You've got a smart phone but a dumb ass..."
• memeograph 8y ago
  What I want to know is why years into its existence, Android still can't stop waking up the screen for no reason, with no notification displaying. Whatever app(s) is doing this can still keep doing it to this day, on my #2 poop OnePlus. So clearly it can't be that bad. Lock em down. App developers are terrible and have no taste. Y'all had years to make these devices useful and failed. Instead it's all cloud idiocy.
• DanCarvajal 8y ago
  App vendors, don't abuse background tasks.
• blauditore 8y ago
  That's why I'm happy with Android One (which many Nokia phones come with these days).
  • sorenjan 8y ago
    Apparently the app that kills other apps comes installed on Nokias with Android One as well. https://www.reddit.com/r/Nokia/comments/actk7z/android_one_phones_has_the_evenwell_services/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Nokia/comments/actk7z/android_one_p...
    • pja 8y ago
      It’s there on my Nokia 7+ running Android 9.
      • sorenjan 8y ago
        Have you had any problems because of it?
        • pja 8y ago
          Not once I turned off battery optimisation for the apps I wanted to run in the background (BBC Sounds / Radio apps, a couple of fitness related apps.) The total lack of any feedback as to what was actually killing these apps in the first place is the problem - the user experience is terrible. The phone just kills an app that worked perfectly before this release of Android, with no explanation or notification so the user can correct false assumptions. The user is left poking about in the settings until they stumble across the battery optimisation and have an "ah ha!" moment.
• hiddentruth 8y ago
  I am glad that they are doing it. Also, I don't think this is being done for benchmarks or marketing. Pretty much all mobile manufacturers specify/market the battery capacity in mAh and not in terms of hours. Also, even in cases where the battery life is marketed as full day/2 day, I don't think it impacts the purchase decisions. Killing background apps has annoyed me sometimes, but there have always been solutions by tweaking the settings, in my experience (on Nokia, Xiaomi & Samsung). Overall, it has definitely improved my experience by drastically improving battery life. The article says "just to get a little more juice", which I have found to be untrue in my experience. For example, comparing the battery life of Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 running MIUI vs the same hardware running Lineage OS, the battery life was significantly better on MIUI and worth the sacrifice of spending some additional time in setting up apps for background execution. I wish my current Nokia phone was more aggressive in killing tasks.
• Yizahi 8y ago
  On the other hand there is an uncontrollable mess of bad apps made even by reputable vendors such as Samsung that just sometimes enter whatever weird state that is impossible to debug and just drain battery like there is no tomorrow. More advanced power drainers don't drain battery themselves but hide in shadows and just keep the phone in "awake" state, essentially halving it's battery life and are very hard to catch and impossible to fix (except for uninstall). I'm both hands for ultra aggressive battery saving modes because if one or even ten apps malfunction it not good but acceptable, if in the evening of day 1 I have 5-10% of battery on the phone that is verifiable capable of running for 2 days, now this is unacceptable. It it renders Skype on mobile unusable, because it is always killed by battery saver, well to hell with such crappy app, their competitors work just fine in the same environment.
• spalt 8y ago
  "Doze" is a nightmare for apps that need reliable GPS readings.. the only real solution is a service that polls continually to get the GPS when the screen is on so that when the screen is off it can use it to do various background tasks (and of course, it ends up not being super accurate as when the screen is off the user is typically moving, which is when you'd want the GPS to be accurate). This ends up using more energy than would have been saved if the GPS wasn't available periodically when the screen is off! It's totally ridiculous..
• finchisko 8y ago
  Device manufacturers favoring some apps by putting them on a whitelist to prevent them from being killed should be considered as unfair practice (potentially illegal).
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• chrisreed212 8y ago
  Interesting - I recently got myself an S9 and my wife a OnePlus 6T, and the OnePlus gets much better battery life (with fewer apps and overall lighter usage) - but now I'm not so impressed if that's how it's achieved. It's a fairly divisive issue - I can understand developers getting frustrated if their app's functionality is broken, but I do think this should be more in the user's control. A permissions-based model for backgrounding would be better, but there's too much permission prompting as well on Android (and this is something you can't back up - so on any restore, you're left 'allowing' permissions in every app you use in a new way - yes, when I select the camera mode in an app, I want to allow use of the camera - gets tedious across a bunch of different apps). My S9 (or maybe it's just Android) also puts a notification up if an app continues to run when I click 'back' out of it (or some other heuristic - it's not for every app, but it does a good job of identifying which are running) - which I think is a better compromise. It makes it much more visible which apps are consuming resources, and tapping the notification takes me to the App Info page with the 'Force Stop' button at the top. It's a bit noisy (it appears even for the stock music player, where obviously I want that to continue running), but it serves well as forcing visibility of battery hogs (whether it's through incompetence or nefarious background data collection), and reassuring to see it there for the apps I want running in the background. I would rather see more of this sort of visibility - maybe as well as just overall battery usage, the battery use in settings should show battery usage by apps when the screen is off or the app is not in the foreground. As the device owner, I want to be in charge of which apps get that privilege.
• hateful 8y ago
  All I want is a way to protect certain apps from being closed, or at least be the last in line to be closed. That way I can make sure the 1-3 apps I always need are ready to go. And I'm not talking about some instantly loading alarm clock app. I'm talking about complex games or applications that take some time to initialize (Star Trek Timelines, for one).
• sergiosgc 8y ago
  I have an Android One Nokia (8 Sirocco), and: a) I wholeheartedly want this behaviour. The phone lasts 2-3 days without recharging, and I no longer fear leaving home with 30% battery. b) It's not an app that kills background apps. It's Android's own Background Activity Manager, where apps that are not whitelisted can't wake up the CPU. They run only when the CPU wakes up for some other reason (screen-on qualifies but it's not the only opportunity). I had to get used to it. In one instance the alarm didn't wake me up, because it is not whitelisted to wake up the CPU. After enabling the correct apps, I maintain pretty much the same great battery life and all app functionality I want.
  • TruthSHIFT 8y ago
    From a usability perspective, this sounds crazy. Is is responsible of me to recommend Android to my non-technical friends?
    • njsubedi 8y ago
      No. For anyone non-technical I always recommend an iPhone. I can simply say, "Press this button if you need to open another app." The difference in UI/UX you see on different android phones and auto-hide enabled soft navigation buttons confuse non technical people a lot.
      • Andrex 8y ago
        > No. For anyone non-technical I always recommend an iPhone. I can simply say, "Press this button if you need to open another app." The difference in UI/UX you see on different android phones and auto-hide enabled soft navigation buttons confuse non technical people a lot. I wonder how they'll deal with the new gesture nav (both iOS and Android), because I think that's possibly more confusing to a layman.
    • apexalpha 8y ago
      I wouldn't say so. I got my grandma a cheap Android phone and a book to help her learn because I thought it'd be better since I also have Android and can help her. My grandma is 89 now, she uses Whatsapp, Youtube and whatnot and I am not kidding but within 2 months she had: - AVG antivirus (an ad told her she had a virus) - She had batterylife for 7 hours before a charge was needed due to shitty apps - Ads on her lock screen?! - Ads on her homepage After 6 months and 3 house calls to fix her phone we gave up and she got my aunts old iPhone 5s with a new battery. It runs iOS 12 now and it runs flawlessly and protects her from all the stuff I mentioned. From a guy that has always had Android: most users need iOS level protection. Just simple facts.
• sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Google had better understand this kind of fragmentation is what makes their platform useless. It's fine for vendors to do specific things, but it has to be very clear, documented, and within certain parameters. Google has to realize that they are responsible for coordinating and publishing this information, and making sure it's clearly communicated to developers. That they don't grasp this is byzantine. There's a corollary in tech, relating to how many API's are released without proper documentation, thereby rendering all of the 'hard work' of making the software basically useless. I should add: dealing with these kinds of problems are quite fundamentally different than other engineering challenges. For some reason, while working on this stuff, I can't help but feel frustrated and angry, mostly at Google (and the vendors) - because we're essentially 'solving their stupidity'. It's costing you money, and many small businesses don't have spare money and risk to hand out. It seriously strains developer relations and perpetuates an existential notion that developers have been 'lied to' by the platform vendors.
• lgleason 8y ago
  Compared to IOS, Android is very forgiving. That said, it also does a lot worse with battery life. As an Android dev it can be annoying to work around, but I appreciate why they have taken these steps!
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• hart_russell 8y ago
  I used Android for 9 years until I recently got the iPhone 10s. I'm never switching back. The only thing I miss is automated profiles using Tasker. Vertical integration and lack of SKUs has major advantages.
• yccheok 8y ago
  I think Google should consider addressing this issue in their next Android. If you browse through Alarm Clock app in Google Play Store, you will realize most them are having similar customer complain - "The app used to work till I upgrade Android OS" Currently, I need to post the text in my Google Play Store description :- " Reminder doesn't work reliably for certain devices. Their over aggressive Battery management mode, have prevent reminder to work in background. Please turn off that "feature", allow WeNote runs in background, if you want reminder to work reliably. Please read https://dontkillmyapp.com/?3 https://dontkillmyapp.com/?3 for solution. "
• benbenolson 8y ago
  Does this feature affect notifications? More specifically, could this be the reason I've recently not received Discord notifications for DMs?
• georgeecollins 8y ago
  It is really important to point out when cell manufacturers "improve" Android in a way that breaks apps. They are doing this for the improved battery stat. But if even a few users are dissuaded from buying their headset because it has a poor compatibility rating they will find better solutions. How about a bigger battery or one that can be exchanged? Or a more power efficient phone. Both are possible.
• fixermark 8y ago
  Counterpoint: Battery life consumption rarely comes up as a feature bullet-point for an app writer, because visibility on whether a given app is a battery hog is low (both for developers and users). There are a couple of reasons iOS was so draconian about background processes for most of its history, and this was one of them. This ecosystem shift puts pressure back on developers to get creative and ask hard questions about how much energy they really need to consume for their tasks. One issue is that these first furtive steps in that direction may not be putting the tools in the developers' hands to do that well. But everything in software starts at an early phase. (It'll be interesting to see whether the market prioritizes battery life by getting the phones implementing these features or app richness by treating these phones as "damaged" and routing around them. This site certainly helps customers make that choice).
  • avree 8y ago
    >Battery life consumption rarely comes up as a feature bullet-point for an app writer, because visibility on whether a given app is a battery hog is low (both for developers and users). Both platforms offer extremely easy to access, at-a-glance views of which apps are using the most battery for any given period.
  • zmmmmm 8y ago
    I agree. What's really broken is lack of a good feedback loop both to app developers and the OS vendors. It would be good if this translated to two things: - google mandates that killing background apps must be based on actual battery consumption - when an app that requested background permissions is background-killed, this is reported to the app developer and OS vendor in some sort of aggregate metrics they can see - users should get some kind of report or notification as well about it You would instantly see both OS vendors and app developers trying to optimise the battery life of their apps so that they can stay alive. Ideally, users who want to should be able to actually set thresholds on how much battery any app can consume. Eg: if I am OK that my phone only lasts an hour I should be allowed to tell it to keep my minecraft server on on the background so everyone can keep playing.
• PaulHoule 8y ago
  App publishers, don't kill my battery!
• ratling 8y ago
  90% of the time you don't need to constantly run crap in the background scooping up my personal information, thanksno.
• zaro 8y ago
  I think the approach taken by these phone manufacturers a tually makes a lot of sense. Most developers won't admit it but a lot of apps are quite terrible nowadays. Yes it is very convenient that your app does something in the background that is maybe useful, but it's only one app. When you have 30-40 apps installed w/o auto kill, the battery drainage is terrible. For me moving from LG to Xiaomi was great in terms of battery life. And yes, sometimes there are app which shouldn't be killed but it's easy enough to change their setting in the battery saver. And really these are only few, most app deserve the auto kill, as they abuse the priviledge of being able to run in the background.
• crtasm 8y ago
  Signal's support docs have instructions for various brands of phone. Really shouldn't be necessary https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007318711-Troubleshooting-Notifications https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007318711-Tr...