No combined notification+ringer volume control? No non-dismissable notifications? No disabling of the bottom search bar? fair point this is launcher issue What the fuck is that shit?!
Since Android 10 the OS has really gone downhill IMO.
IIRC they have also been ripping out workarounds that people use to keep their apps open, so expect things like Syncthing/OpenVPN/Element/Termux etc to no longer be able to survive in the background - I believe the non dismissable notifications are a part of that too. To me this also means apps using their own push services are now being forced into a position where theyāll need to consider Google Cloud Messaging.
The OpenVPN one is pretty poor because unless you have it set to be always-on, Android can kill it freely now, then completely bypass your VPN preference because āitās not workingā
These new changes in A14 kind of show everything wrong with having an ad company in charge of a mobile OS
Set the battery usage of your essential apps to Unrestricted and your persistence problem is solved. Android has vastly improved its security by cutting off the workarounds shady (and legit) apps have used to persist. Some of these improvement are from GrapheneOS devs hardening the AOSP pipeline and increasing everyoneās privacy. You mention VPN apps getting neutered. Iāve never experienced Wireguard getting killed by Android and I use that app nearly continuously. I also use Syncthing all day. Setting its battery use to unrestricted keeps it working just fine. I use the appās internal options to disable syncing when my battery tapers off. The hacky workarounds you speak of to maintain persistence on A14 should be killed off to improve everyoneās privacy.
Set the battery usage of your essential apps to Unrestricted and your persistence problem is solved
The background app battery usage feature (otherwise known as āallow background activityā, ābattery careā, or āAdaptive batteryā) is a different feature to what Iām talking about here sadly AFAICT, and doesnāt affect the relative importance weight of apps when Androidās memory management is looking for things to kill.
The only thing that the background app battery usage restriction does is stop āinactiveā apps from running in the background if they are using up a lot of CPU time, and if the app is not being interacted with frequently: either directly by the user, indirectly via Google Cloud Messaging, or by another app on the device. From what I can tell, itās completely separate to Androidās memory management and solely exists to extend battery life.
Android has vastly improved its security by cutting off the workarounds shady (and legit) apps have used to persist.
Shady apps already persist using Google (Firebase) Cloud Messaging, and this change does not impact them. Even if they are killed by the separate background battery app usage feature, a simple push message typically brings these back.
The hacky workarounds you speak of to maintain persistence on A14 should be killed off to improve everyoneās privacy.
I wouldnāt exactly categorize this as a hacky workaround, since it follows the documented relative app importance weights used by Androidās memory management. Users can even bypass this themselves by swiping on the persistent notification, and hiding those types of app notifications.
If anything IMO it forces apps to be less transparent about their activity, since they cannot communicate to the user that they are running
If Iām wrong about the background battery app featureās seemingly lack of impact on Androidās memory management please do let me know - Iāve yet to come across anything suggesting it does ā¹ļø
Iām all for apps communicating what they are doing with notifications. Iām not interested in an app maintaining persistence merely by having a notification. I understand the notifications are silence-able on a granular level per app. I just prefer the actual pop-up from recent Android that says an app is requesting to do something tasking at all times on my device. If it throws a notification (to tell me what its actually doing), Iām all for that too. If I trust the app: Iāll probably silence that granular notification.
and yet plenty of stuff still runs in the background for me, eating my battery when I donāt need it to be in the background
Did they something in their recent API? How come OS van kill background apps if battery set to unrestricted?
