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Sleep as Android picks up beta Material You support — and Android 12 isn't even out yet
Urbandroid is usually ahead of the curve
For many, Android 12 is Material You first and foremost, with all the other features and enhancements playing second fiddle to the new (and quite snazzy) dynamic theming and design language. Google's already updating some of its apps to take advantage of the new changes, but one enterprising developer has taken the partially undocumented and non-final APIs into his own hands. Sleep as Android is soon releasing a beta version of the app with support for Android 12's Material You, and you can download it a few days early here.
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.
Samsung takes dubious honor as OEM most aggressively killing background apps
The new Android 11 update has made matters worse for background apps
OnePlus is notorious for aggressively killing background apps, much to user dismay, but Samsung traditionally hasn’t been any further behind. The Korean giant has now, in fact, beaten OnePlus to take the pole position in Don’t kill my app’s hall of shame — making it worse than even the likes of Huawei and Xiaomi. What led to this promotion is Samsung’s recent Android 11 update, which is harsher on background apps than ever.
DontKillMyApp benchmark released from Early Access with new icon
From Urbandroid, the folks behind dontkillmyapp.com and Sleep as Android
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Urbandroid, the developers behind Sleep as Android, have suffered plenty of headaches getting their app to work on a wide range of Android phones. Different manufacturers all think they have great ideas when it comes to stretching out battery life. Usually, they do it by aggressively killing apps in the background, which can break app functionality. Urbandroid even made a site called DontKillMyApp to track and shame the worst offenders and point out how to fix these issues on different phones (if you even can). Now Urbandroid is making a new benchmarking tool to measure your own phone's background apps performance. Like the previous site, it's also called DontKillMyApp, and it's available now in early access on the Play Store.
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.