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Google is finally helping developers fight back against smartphone manufacturers breaking how Android apps work
The new CTS-D and its first test could have a huge and beneficial impact on developers and customers — if Google gives it teeth
We dance around it and claim that it's less of an issue every year, but Android still has problems because of fragmentation. One of the most annoying ways fragmentation can still manifest is when smartphone manufacturers mess with how apps work and behave, breaking expected behaviors or adjusting how they work to plump out battery life. This means that, from phone to phone and manufacturer to manufacturer, apps can behave differently than customers expect, offering an inconsistent experience and a developer support nightmare.
Google says it's trying to help fix Android's background app issues
The longstanding Android bugbear is seemingly still a priority
Android's long had problems managing apps running in the background. While Google offers guidelines about how devices running Android should handle background processes, manufacturers still take it upon themselves to tweak Android's systems in the name of battery efficiency, often breaking intended app behavior in the process. At Google I/O last week, Google made it clear it's still working on it, highlighting ongoing efforts to tackle the issue from multiple angles.
Android 13 promises improved memory management, but not necessarily for everybody
It'll impact low-end hardware the most
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No matter how much RAM manufacturers pour into their smartphones, we've all experienced Android killing background apps a little too relentlessly. At best, it might mean relaunching your last-played song on Spotify, or reloading a tweet on Twitter, but in some cases, you might end up losing unsaved data. With an upcoming change to Android 13 currently in testing, Google might finally be ready to improve how memory management works.
Android apps that have to run in the background like sleep-trackers have had a rough time. Among other things, they suffer inconsistent and unreliable background app limitations across different Android versions, which can interfere with how the apps work at a very fundamental level. This doesn't fix that issue, but today Google is rolling out a specific API just for those apps, letting them pull sleep duration data right from the system itself.
COVID-19 tracing apps may fail to notify exposed users due to aggressive OEM battery saving measures
Showing once again that Google needs to enforce a standardized approach to background activity on Android
We've extensively reported on OEMs that needlessly kill useful background processes to save battery life, creating problems like missed notifications and alarms, aborted sleep tracking, broken upload schedules, and more. While all of these issues are annoying, they're not exactly life-threatening. However, as soon as we're talking about coronavirus tracing apps, missed exposure notifications could put you or others at risk, and it looks like that happened to the German COVID-19 tracking app, which hasn't been able to alert some people due to background restrictions.
Phone makers are breaking your favorite apps with reckless changes to Android's power optimization features
And Google isn't doing enough to fix things
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Battery life has been an Android bugbear for years. While Google has made some significant changes to its mobile OS to improve things (with success, I'd argue), many popular smartphone makers still feel the need to take further steps to enhance longevity — and it's coming at a cost. Many go above and beyond the battery life enhancements featured in so-called "stock" Android, and frequently these alterations cause problems, resulting in issues ranging from delayed notifications, to prematurely killed apps, and even outright breaking behaviors that developers rely on. In fact, the lack of predictability that has ensued under the current laissez-faire power management scheme has become so dire that it recently took the top spot in a developer AMA request thread for Android 11 on reddit. Ultimately, this results in an inconsistent experience for both app-makers and end-users like you and me, and Google needs to put its foot down.
Google's response to Android apps getting delayed or killed in the background leaves a lot to be desired
The company can and should do more for developers
Google's Android AMA is underway, and the team's engineers have already answered the most hotly-anticipated question: How will Google fix the problem of inconsistent background limits across different manufacturers and devices? It's a long-standing problem where overly aggressive power management tweaks break functionality in plenty of apps, resulting in a headache for developers and frustration for users. According to the AMA, Google does plan on making a few changes to help fix things, but the company isn't doing all that it could.
OnePlus just published a recap of its second "Open Ears Forum" from all the way back in May. At the event, it gathered a handful of developers and fans central to the OnePlus community to solicit their feedback. Four months later, the company has revealed a set of changes influenced by that feedback, including more timely kernel sources for Open Betas and a new bounty program for reporting vulnerabilities. Most importantly for customers, though, OnePlus has promised to finally fix how aggressive its software is at killing apps in the background.
Usually, OnePlus is praised for its Oxygen OS software, which offers a light-touch, near-stock experience — at least, visually. Turns out, the company has been making some deeper changes to Android on its phones, and not all of them are for the best. Right now one of the most frustrating parts of OnePlus ownership for many is the company's aggressive battery optimization settings, which can kill apps you may want to be kept open. And worse, if you try to disable these settings on a per-app basis, they can be later randomly reset to defaults.
The days when third-party battery-saving apps were necessary to hit a satisfactory number of hours off a single charge are long behind the vast majority of Android users, thanks to improvements like Doze and Adaptive Battery. But in some cases, this measure of progress has become something of a Pyrrhic victory, with useful background processes carelessly destroyed and developers taking the brunt of user ire. Well, the Urbandroid team — the gang behind apps Sleep As Android, Twilight, and others — doesn't plan on going quietly into the night. In fact, they're going on the offensive with a new informational website where the most flagrant OEM offenders are shamed and users and developers are educated.
Google's recent batch of Pixels aren't without their issues, and as more phones get in consumer's hands, new reports of problems surface. The latest controversy stems from the Pixel 3's apparent inability to shuffle more than a few apps at a time. In fact, taking a photo is apparently enough to kill Spotify if it's playing music in the background, and in our own tests cycling more than 3-4 apps can force some out of memory. Maybe 4GB of RAM wasn't enough for a flagship phone in 2018 after all, Google?
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- As spotted by XDA Developers, it looks like Android P will also block idle background apps from accessing the microphone. Needless to say, the possibility that an app could be recording users without their knowledge — as long as it had, at some point, been granted permission to access the microphone — is a gross violation of privacy. Of course, there are some situations where you might actually want an app to continue recording audio while in the background, so hopefully they'll be some way to allow for that in Android P.
We still don't have much solid information about the next release of Android — we've heard that Android P could have some notch optimizations and that access to undocumented APIs could get blocked, but we don't really know too much more than that. However, the open-source nature of Android means that we can sometimes get a glimpse of what the next release of Android might have in store.
Just about every new version of Android has reportedly improved battery life for end users... with a range of successes and failures over the years. In the upcoming Android O, Google is banking on a new feature called background limits to extend battery longevity. The basic idea is that the system will automatically limit the active capabilities of background apps, in a way that won't be detrimental to users while reducing overall resource use.
Anyone who has made the jump to Android 4.3, which admittedly isn't that many people right now, may have noticed that some applications now plant persistent notifications in the status bar. We offered this as a disclaimer in our post about manually updating a Nexus 4 to Android 4.3. Turns out, this is completely intentional. Android now forces persistent notifications on unkillable apps that run silently in the background. This is an attempt to call attention to behavior that isn't quite okay.