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?!
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 everyone’s privacy. You mention VPN apps getting neutered. I’ve 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 app’s 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 everyone’s 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 “allow background activity”, “battery care”, or “Adaptive battery”) is a different feature to what I’m talking about here sadly AFAICT, and doesn’t affect the relative importance weight of apps when Android’s memory management is looking for things to kill.
The only thing that the background app battery usage restriction does is stop “inactive” 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, it’s completely separate to Android’s 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 everyone’s privacy.
I wouldn’t exactly categorize this as a hacky workaround, since it follows the documented relative app importance weights used by Android’s 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 I’m wrong about the background battery app feature’s seemingly lack of impact on Android’s memory management please do let me know - I’ve yet to come across anything suggesting it does ☹️
I’m all for apps communicating what they are doing with notifications. I’m 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), I’m all for that too. If I trust the app: I’ll probably silence that granular notification.
I honestly agree with all mentioned.
I’m just mainly upset at Google for providing no replacement for the memory management situation, since apps like Syncthing and Element can’t reopen themselves once killed by the system, and we as users won’t have any visibility of that when it happens. The persistent notifications aren’t ideal to begin with, honestly would have preferred if they let us “pin” activities instead - or some other approach that has a similar weight compared to persistent notifications
It’s a bit unfair to remove this, enabling Android to close these apps early whenever there’s some memory pressure, due to them not showing anything to the user. With the only documented solution being sending a notification via Google Cloud Messaging to indirectly reopen the app on the device
The background battery usage situation is perfect with the confirmation prompt IMO, but really wish Google would have considered the full app lifecycle instead of just the background battery usage perspective.
