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
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.
I honestly agree with all mentioned.
Iām just mainly upset at Google for providing no replacement for the memory management situation, since apps like Syncthing and Element canāt reopen themselves once killed by the system, and we as users wonāt have any visibility of that when it happens. The persistent notifications arenāt ideal to begin with, honestly would have preferred if they let us āpinā activities instead - or some other approach that has a similar weight compared to persistent notifications
Itās a bit unfair to remove this, enabling Android to close these apps early whenever thereās 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.
