Ah, I realized now by context that you’re only talking about android. (You only said device manufacturers so I thought you were referring to iOS as well.) But

Ah, I realized now by context that you’re only talking about android. (You only said device manufacturers so I thought you were referring to iOS as well.) But I had this whole reply typed up for iOS so, may as well include it: — I can only speak for iOS, but it definitely doesn’t work this way on iOS. The ability to run in the background is something you can grant to any app, and there’s no special treatment of any one third party app versus another. It’s not unlimited though even if you do grant the permission... if they use too much memory in the background they may be killed, and there’s a limit to how long they can stay running in the background. Push notifications are supported anyway, because the apps servers are supposed to deliver push notifications to APNS, which delivers them to your phone on behalf of the app even if the app is closed. But the transition from “app is running in the background and notifies you” (which can’t last forever) and “app is killed but the server delivers a notification through APNS” (which works when the app is dead) is often implemented poorly by developers and isn’t seamless. It’s hard to get it right. But no third party apps get treated any different in this regard.