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Top Android Phone Makers Are Killing Useful Background Processes and Breaking 3rd-Party Apps To 'Superficially Improve' Battery Life, Developers Allege (dontkillmyapp.com)
A team of developers has accused several popular smartphone vendors of compromising the functionality of third-party apps and other background processes on their phones in an attempt to "superficially improve" the battery life. The team, Urbandroid, further alleges that these vendors have not correctly implemented Doze mode feature that Google introduced with Android Marshmallow. They also say that Google appears to be doing nothing about it.
Among the worst offenders are, per developers (in descending order): Nokia, OnePlus, Xiaomi, Huawei, Meizu, Sony, Samsung, and HTC.
Among the worst offenders are, per developers (in descending order): Nokia, OnePlus, Xiaomi, Huawei, Meizu, Sony, Samsung, and HTC.
We don't need that shit running in the background. Much like every windows program that wants to run at startup.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
These companies must stop immediately. It is intolerable not to mention how badly the companies are hurting themselves by forcing developers to stop supporting their phones. Additionally this is a privilege the companies taking that they explicitly agreed not to take in their terms of service for many years.
A phone doesn't need a lot of background apps. It needs to make calls and texts. If I'm interacting with it, then it can power up things needed for a browser and other garbage. Once I put the phone away, it ought to suspend all that garbage.
About time makers act like they own their phones. Finally!
Trump powa!
Useful background processes that are useful for whom? The developers who want to harvest data continuously?
They allow these shit tier manufacturers to break things in Android and still sell them as Android OS.
I mean, If it is a forked release like say "OxygenOS" for Oneplus, I can then accept it is not Google's problem, but when something is sold as Android, it should not be allowed to do dumb stuff like this.
What, some background process that's responsible for somehow updating the batter meter, resulting in it not going down even though the battery is going down?
No, that's not the case? Then the battery life is not 'superficially' extended, it is either extended or it isn't. If they claim better battery life as a reason, but they don't actually get battery life, that is not superficially extended, that is flat out incorrect.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This is quite annoying. I found stuff like 'FolderSync', which will allow you to, say, copy the contents of a directory from your phone to your Google Drive automatically every night, would get killed off mid copy as it runs as a background tab.
Similarly when copying a large file using a file manager, or downloading a large file in the background.
It's possible to set an app up as an exception, but you have to do this for all applications that you want to be able to run in the background.
Yes there are some apps that you probably don't want to run, but it's really frustrating when it stops the apps you want to allow run, and you have to go hunting for a setting that has a different name on each phone.
Smaller and thicker phones with a decently thick battery.
We DON'T need a 7 inch phone as thin as a knife!
I have a OnePlus 6 and I was having issues with applications getting killed in the background. Most frustratingly was when my couch to 5K app got task killed with about 45 seconds left at the end of my run. But guess what? In the settings menu you can disable battery optimization for specific apps. Haven't had a problem since.
Seriously? You're bitching about having control of what hidden things your phone is doing? This is not a bad thing. Your phone shouldn't be doing shit behind your back without your explicit permission. ... and you're talking about important things, like bulk copies of files. That's a very good thing for you to have control over.
I just got an Android phone because I had to due (main phone is a Windows phone). Holy shit, what a mess it is. It has tons of processes that are indecipherable. How does anybody manage all of that?
I don't respond to AC's.
While their phones aren't the most exciting, they come with basically no crap ware installed.
Shouldn't the headline be:
"Top Android Phone-Makers Are Killing Useful-Background-Processes and Breaking 3rd-Party-Apps To 'Superficially Improve' Battery-Life, Developers Allege"
i have a Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus and i disabled facebook, and a few other non-essential things i dont use, and on top of that when i dont need to use a full featured smartphone i set the battery saver to maximum which disabled everything except for phone & text, which makes most the apps inaccessible and that is fine with me most the time, i can always turn the battery saver mode off when i need to use a full featured phone, then switch back to max battery saver mode when i am done
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
that's all I want to know.
So I can avoid these apps at all cost !
captcha : exacts
But you had to suck the green robot's cock.
I for one welcome our green robot cock, sorry, uhm I mean overlords.
Smaller and thicker phones with a decently thick battery.
Ok, that is what YOU want. That has little reflection on what everyone else might want. I don't need a smaller phone (I like the size of the iPhone X) but I wouldn't object to the battery being thicker and it having a better camera. But that is what I want and you might feel differently. Some people want a tablet sized phone for some reason (bad eyesight, showing off, just like big screens, etc) and that's their right.
Personally I'm fine with the base phone being thin provided they make an actually decent battery case which nobody has so far. Every battery case I've seen to date has been a clumsy and ugly hack, including the ones the OEMs make (looking at you Apple). They could actually put real functions into the case besides padding and a battery but to date no phone maker seems interested in bothering.
Not surprised Nokia being the leader. It is owned by Microsoft now, and Microsoft will always game every benchmark.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
These are NOT "superficial" battery improvements. They are significant gains in battery life by forcefully killing apps that are forcing the phone/cpu to stay awake. A simple google search reveals thousands of complaints about battery drain with these apps installed even when not actively using them.
An open OS that manufacturers can tailor or a standard one controlled by one company to ensure compatibility?
Manufacturers not letting apps run in the background doing who knows what or allowing them and not having background processes top unexpectedly?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
iOS, the "I want to be seen as rich but not only am I poor after shelling out $1000 for a phone every couple years, I need a brand to define my personality"fag's phone.
I agree that the user must be in control, but then those manufacturers must provide that level of control to the users. Whatever happened to an idea that the user should be able to switch background processing on and off for any given application?
You can't handle the truth.
... and give us bigger fucking batteries!!!!
I won't cede control of my performance to someone elses piss-poor decisions for gaming benchmarks.
Equally I won't be a slave to retards wanting shitty thin hardware with basically less and less features each iteration that comes out.
If I wanted to have something that resembled a smartphone, I would make it myself. It's not that hard. The specs and hardware are out there. It'd take a tech illiterate a week or two most, a tech literate one a weekend or less.
I'll stick with phoning people as little as possible and controlling when I communicate with people.
Phones and internet crap don't need to mix.
Android is too much of a mess to be taken seriously.
It still has dumb decisions all over the place even in the current versions.
Windows 98 was less retarded and that was great.
I'll stick with an OS that gives me absolute control over software, or the closest to it. (hint, no OS offers 100% control, it usually requires a bunch of software to get near that level, like sandboxing, VMs, etc.)
Android is not there. Not even close. In fact it breaks a very important part of Linux to function, which also massively breaks security of the OS and results in most of the viruses you hear about in Android.
The fact it isn't fixed yet is embarrassing. It would require "too much work" now. Whole APIs need changing, APIs which are now huge and even more complicated. Great job ya fucking geniuses.
I can confirm this, though I thought it was just Android itself, I didn't realize OEM makers were doing it.
Once I updated my OP3T to Marshmellow, apps stopped working.
This includes Dropbox (photo upload stopped working), Magisk (SU requests break), Google Voice (no text/VM notifications), or any other app that has push notifications.
I have to go into battery settings and set each app to "Don't optimize" to fix them.
Funny that you Android fags always seem to forget that iPhones typically maintain 40% of their retail value for trade at 2 years vs Android phones that may as well be toilet paper at that point.
iPhone: Spend $1000 on a phone, trade in for $400 off $1000 new iPhone in 2 years.
Android: Spend $800 on a phone, throw it away and spend $800 on a new phone in 2 years.
In 4 years, the 3 iPhones cost just $2200 vs the 3 Androids that cost $2400. Simple math that you fuckdroids seem to fail at. But of course, it's not necessary to trade iPhones every 2 years when there are OS upgrades still available for a couple more years to go:
iPhone: upgrades for about 4 years on average.
Android: upgrades for 2 years if you're lucky and the phone manufacturer bothers to produce them.
So, yeah, keep burning your money on the biggest malware-infested platform available, genius.
They have to add their bloat and junk, most of the time doing it poorly to boot. Samsung is the prime example - it would seem that the Samsung software people do their best to ruin the Samsung hardware. Which is one of the reasons why I am not likely to ever buy a Samsung phone, and also why I have advised those in my circle not to buy a Samsung phone.
...that Apple tried to avoid to begin with in iOS: Once you allow apps to run in the background, more and more apps want to do that and the bottom line is that the phone is busy all the time and sucks your battery dry and nobody knows why.
Apple was quite drastic and just didn't allow background tasks with very few exceptions: VoiceIP apps, chat apps and audio apps, also apps are allowed to finish tasks (like downloads) they began while they were in the foreground for max. 5 minutes. Some people think this is too strict, but the sweet spot is somewhere between "no background tasks at all" and "whatever, let apps do what they want", with both extremes probably being utterly wrong.
You won't find a solution that will satisfy everyone, but as soon as you have phone manufacturers putting up their own policies and hacks nobody knows what will happen with his app when and why and under which Android version. The fact that they seem to NEED their own hacks seems to indicate that Google didn't really solve this problem with Android.
The absolute best thing that could happen in the Android space is LineageOS becoming a single-click installation operation. Alarmingly, many bootloaders are locked at the factory, and the situation seems to be getting worse.
I do hope bootloader locking becomes illegal as part of right-to-repair legislation being drafted worldwide.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I'd like to be able to keep my KeePass database handy when it's needed without having to stop and waste half a minute regaining access to it, but Android insists on randomly killing the app in the background when it's doing nothing but occasionally verifying database sync. There's nothing explicit, I get no notification, it just quietly gets terminated. The author has acknowledged the problem from a usability standpoint, but apparently can do nothing to prevent it.
There should - MUST - be a way for me to designate mission-critical processes that should never die, not have the OS killing them at its whim.
You don't think the OS is made by developers too?
In the interrest of fairness All Iphones are (at least advertised as) premium phones, so lets compare like with like. Do premium Android phones lose their value as quicly as the cheaper once? Ii’m not defebding Android manufacturers , Alphabet or Apple each party have plenty of resourperces for doing that them selves, I’m just asking
Again, this is a non-problem. Your app should never have been able to silently snarf data without your explicit permission. Not a standard clickthrough bullshit on the app store, but you making a deliberate action to let it silently copy very personal data.
The calibre of skill required to make a functioning operating system is just a little bit higher than the skill required to slap together a fart app.
Or you could buy a 2 year old android phone for 100 dollars instead of a 400 dollar used apple or 1000+ dollar new phone.
Well, the LG V20 when brand new sold for about $700 on average. Two and a half years later you can pick up a refurbished one for $120-$200.
So, obviously the guy is full of shit when he rants about them being "worthless" after 2 years, but no they do not hold value as well as iphones.
Personally I like it that way. I've found that by buying a 1-2 year old android phone and replacing all the factory bloat with LineageOS (or a similar slimmed-down ROM) I end up with a phone that is better in most ways than it would have been when brand new at a cost of about a quarter of what I would spend for a new phone.
You can't do that kind of thing with apple devices. If you buy a used iPhone you are getting dated hardware running stock software (if you're lucky; maybe instead of stock you have a special apple patch which slows down old devices) and you have zero ability to improve it in any way. Plus you're paying double for the privilege.
>Android: Spend $800 on a phone
Why the fuck should anyone go buy a new high end phone every two years anyway? Aside from the manufacturer upgrading to a higher end CPU and more RAM, they're fucking things up by removing useful ports and doing dumb shit like putting a notch on the screen.
Alarms are implemented in hardware, it's call an RTC. Consumes zero background CPU, no "background process" necessary, unless your OS is designed horribly.
If you're not playing music, there should be no process in the background. DUH!
a better designed OS would allow you to schedule events in the future rather than running a sleeping service. When the time is reached, the OS would call your program with whatever parameters you specified.
Sort of like cron. However, a battery optimization app might default to delaying an app's cron jobs until charging has begun.