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Android vendors, don’t kill my app

dontkillmyapp.com

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Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#171

Post by CannisterFlux »

seszett wrote: post #66
perlgeek wrote: post #63

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?

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.

On some Xiaomi devices the stock alarm clock - the Google one - regularly fails to trigger alarms. If Google themselves cannot code an Android alarm clock that works with these aggressive battery saving anti-features there's little hope for anyone else.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#172

Post by eyko »

me551ah wrote: post #138
yason wrote: post #129

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…

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.

I have a OnePlus 6 and none of the apps you've just mentioned fail to receive notifications when my phone is asleep.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#173

Post by arendtio »

yason wrote: post #129

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…

Actually, I think it depends on the use-case. I mean, there are some use-cases which are inherently battery intensive. Like accurate position tracking or receiving real-time messages.

I think the problem is, that many users do not know which apps require more energy due to the specific problem they solve and which apps are just badly engineered. So to let the user decide every case is a bad option (+ decision fatigue). Letting the developers decide is even worse, as they would simply say, that their app requires as much energy as they need. So the vendor thinks he has to make that decision (as they don't want their phone to being perceived as having a bad battery life), who neither knows anything about the specific app nor about the use-case (probably the worst option).

I think the system should simply report battery offenders (above the threshold of a well-engineered instant messaging app for example) to the user in a manner of 'App X used Y% of your battery in the last 24 hours. By limiting the battery usage, the app might not function as it is supposed to be. Do you want to limit the battery usage of this app?'

That way, most developers would have a chance to build good apps which do not get reported and users would stay in control.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#174

Post by scarface74 »

lstamour wrote: post #17
silversmith wrote: post #6

I haven't followed the scene closely, but isn't it the same behavior as Apple? Can you even do background tasks in iOS?

You can, for certain classes of application, and for certain types of tasks (like background downloads). It’s entirely managed by the OS, and is often reduced or suspended entirely under Low Power mode. But Apple allows for other kinds of wake notifications and is usually pretty good with Push Notifications due to carrier partnerships. That said, Apple does intentionally make certain apps a lot harder: https://stacko…

And... well, it rarely allows apps that duplicate built-in functionality on the App Store.

This is such an old meme and there are plenty of existence proofs that it isn’t true. There are third party apps for every single app on iOS including navigation, podcasts, mail, music players, calendars, password managers (with integration APIs specifically for them as of iOS 12), weather, notes, etc.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#175

Post by f055 »

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..."

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#176

Post by memeograph »

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.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#177

Post by masklinn »

adrianhon wrote: post #148

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 w…

> 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.

That seems to be exactly what TFA notes in various per-manufacturer segments (the color blocks with poop emoji are clickable and provide manufacturer-specific information and complaints) e.g. for Nokia:

> every [background] process gets killed after 20 minutes regardless it is actually supposed to be running and doing a useful job for the user.

or for OnePlus:

> Not only did users need to enable extra settings to make their apps work properly, but those settings even get reset with firmware update so that apps break again and users are required to re-enable those settings on a regular basis. […] On some OnePlus phones there is also a thing called App Auto-Launch which essentially prevents apps from working in the background.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#178

Post by mcv »

yason wrote: post #129

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…

Killing apps that the user isn't using or relying on is a good thing. Randomly killing apps running in the background is a bad thing.

This sounds like it should be an app permission: is this app allowed to run in the background or not?

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#179

Post by tinus_hn »

simonh wrote: post #95
sudhirj wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yeah, the permissions model in Android vs Apple is different, but multi tasking in particular feels the same. i.e. Apple has fine grained permissions on demand for contacts, microphone, camera, location, etc, and requires that all apps gracefully degrade when permissions is denied. But for multitasking there isn’t really any fine grained permissions - as long as the app is doing a whitelisted task in the backgrou…

As I understand it, on iOS third part apps don’t actually do any tasks in the background, most such services are actually implemented by platform services provided by Apple that the third part apps request or subscribe to. So for example apps request an Apple service to do a background download on their behalf. Or the app subscribes to a notification feed that wakes it up when triggered to handle the notification, bu…

For some basic use cases, like notifications and downloads, there is a special system or api that allows your app to do that in the background without actually running.

If you want to play audio or track gps in the background you need to do things yourself though.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#180

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

gambiting wrote: post #130
yason wrote: post #129

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…

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 conn…

Try selecting 'Lock' for the VPN App from the recent apps section (top right)[1]

[1]:https://imgur.com/Bk8jXbJ

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