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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.
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.
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.
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.
How does anybody manage all of that?
Wrong question. The real question is why should a user HAVE to manage their phone like a sysadmin?
It's a phone. It's an *appliance*. If a user is required to manage their phone to such a degree, then there are severe and fundamental flaws in the phone's OS.
This all stems from the fact that Google gave developers too much control, and developers treated phones as if they were PCs instead of embedded mobile devices. As much as I hate to say it, Apple was right to start with a locked down OS. It is always more difficult to take away permissions and capabilities than it is to gradually give them.
It's been very well established at this point that developers cannot be trusted to do this properly, so it's up to the OS to be tight-fisted in how apps operate. This is especially true when it comes to limited-resource devices like phones. Now Android is in the completely expected position of trying to lock things down without breaking half the apps on the app store.
While I agree for most applications, I'm actually having a problem with this behavior on my Samsung phone. I use an always-on VPN which will often lose connection and then not reconnect because the system has stopped/suspended the VPN application. There are options for disabling the Samsung "battery saver" functions for certain applications but even after doing that, it still happens (although not as often).