Android 11 will let users stop device-makers from killing background apps, says Google Android 11 Beta 2, out this week, is a fairly modest update, focusing primarily on stability and bug fixes. But behind the scenes there are strong indications that a broader shift is afoot, with Google trying to address overall ecosystem inconsistencies that have formed since its initial release. The biggest clue comes from an …
Can I set an app to auto kill itself too?
Auto kill **AND** disable. The sheer arrogance that the vendor should decide for you which apps cannot be disabled, probably encouraged also by Google.
I had been setting up a phone for my daughter to use. I figured I'd disable everything she didn't need (to save on system resources) or that I felt I didn't want to have active. Certainly she didn't need email on the phone (that's what a computer or her school chromebook are for). Nope, couldn't disable it, and when I called the providerr "support" line, they said "Oh, email is a *required* app". Really? Says who? (probably our "friends" at Google).
Gmail is a required part of the Google apps bundle. Want any of them, they have to install all of them. On recent versions of Android Gmail is also trivially easy to disable, at worst you might need to show system processes. Google don't prevent it and I'm surprised a vendor would. You can't uninstall without root though.
The only catch is it's also trivially easy to reenable.
I use BlackBerry Hub, not gmail. gmail is disabled on all my phones, which are Sony. Disabling it reduces battery consumption considerably.
Hub still gives me that very useful BB feature that allows me to control the size of emailed image files without having to edit them. It's worth it for that alone.
I just acquired a second hand unlocked & barely used Samsung Galaxy Note 8 for use in Canadaland.
It boots up broadcasting Verizons name after the initial splash screen, its riddled with Verizon apps that are no use to me as they are not my provider & can't be killed, it at least updated to Android 9 via them. While you can disable Amber Alerts etc you can't disable presidential ones.
As its snapdragon based, the OEM unlock option is not available, making it impossible to root & update to a Custom Android 10 ROM (Apparently).
Overall I'm very pleased by it, but the amount of crap some of it Samsungs the rest of it Verizons is a little OKOK a lot overpowering.
Icon - How can I lose a phone that big in this coat pocket!
While it's not possible to completely remove many shovelware garbage apps without root access, it is quite easy to remove them from a user's profile so they no longer run at all. This can make a staggering difference to the performance and feel of a phone, particularly the mid-range and budget devices.
Here's a couple of the many guides on how to do this: https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatware-without-root-access/ or https://www.xda-developers.com/disable-system-app-bloatware-android/ (I'm not affiliated in any way with this site, it's just pretty useful at times)
I'd much prefer an option that does this. The amount of apps that open up an run unnecessarily in Android is quite astonishing.
Allow me the option without having to root a device, to stop apps running in the background unless I give explicit consent to them doing so.
Kinda both. I've legit apps I want running 24/7 (messaging etc, monitoring etc). The android 9/10 upgrades put some stuff automatically on power saving and killed them early. I've possibly 2 phones that I've seen that also don't have the option to *not* put unused apps into sleep, and then it caused problems as I was not able to use them as intended (constant bluetooth connection etc, so it dropped the speaker/cam/things I was using).
You probably want something like Blokada or a firewall to stomp on unwanted network connections. Background apps themselves are normally not much of a problem unless they're hitting the network a lot. Overaggressive cleanups cause problems with e-mail clients and firewalls.
But, yeah, the user ought to be able to decide.
The mobile comms options appear to be 2G only, 3G only, everything. It would be a lot better if this was split up as Slow, Fast, Everything. Because I'd like to benefit from the 4G around, but not risk reverting to 2G.
Why? Because Edge is just bloody awful. Orange France has it set so data takes priority (and when it's trying to do data, no phone calls will come in, it can't handle both), it spends forever twiddling it's thumbs (nothing at all being sent or received, just trying trying trying), and if it should manage to work, it works at a speed that an analogue modem from the mid '90s would laugh at. 3G+4G please!
The second thing is please twiddle the QoS so that the foreground app always takes precedence, like at least 75% of the available bandwidth if it needs it. Because it's really annoying to have the app that you're wanting to use stall because a dozen background apps want to check stuff (a big offender is Google Play Services). By all means call the mothership, but they're goddamn background apps. Not a single one of them should be given any preference over data transfers of the foreground app, you know, the one the user is attempting to use.
[this last point is related to the first, because the foreground app can be blocked for minutes if the phone gets itself stuck on 2G...and everything lurking decides it wants to use this shiny new connection to call home; sodding Android seems to give them all priority]
With regards to your first point, you can do the first on many Android phones (Sony phones at least) by dialling *#*#4636#*#* and choosing Phone information. I then choose "LTE only" under "Set preferred network type" to have 4G only - I tend to find that this works well on my network with VoLTE enabled as they have as good 4G coverage as 3G and 2G.
The site says Nokia claims the built-in power saver app was disabled on all devices running Android 9 or above last September, but mine still has it and apps still disappear overnight.
One of my 5.1 devices had that. I never saw it again in later versions.
Have you tried this? not ried it myself, but it claims to do the job (see boot speedup option)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=imoblife.toolbox.full
Or these? https://joyofandroid.com/how-to-disable-auto-start-apps-in-android/
Again, more that claim to be able to do it without root
I have a 1TB microSD card so my phone is pretty much s laptop replacement for casual tasks. The one big problem with most phones is that proper background tasks are killed a few minutes after the screen turns off - no exceptions. SFTP is killed, rsync is killed, my map app is killed, no mail is prefetched, video transcoding is gone, and widgets stop updating. VoIP apps like T-Mobile Digits can't take incoming calls or messages (for when you must use a regional SIM while traveling).
The most frustrating part is that junk apps with no backgrounding permission are still using data in the background.
"I have a 1TB microSD card so my phone is pretty much s laptop replacement for casual tasks"
A phone with 5" - 6" screen is NO replacement for proper laptop with proper keyboard. I bet I can get through my work faster than you, without going cross eyed at a smalll keyboard and having to scroll all the time!
Sounds to me like you probably should be rooting your phone and installing an android build that gives you permission to define your own background task tolerance, allow lists and deny lists etc.
Would be nice, except the sheer customer hostility of most mobile manufacturers makes it difficult and often impossible to flash your own Android version. It would have been Microsoft's wet dream to have this much control over hardware YOU paid for.
"Vendors will also be prohibited from exempting apps from their “background kill” policy, which Google claims harms the ecosystem and “decreases innovation.”"
Doesn't apply to Google itself, of course. None of *their* applications can be killed with "power save". Most can't be disabled either, pure asshattery á la Microsoft.
Oooh, gmail is "an essential program"? For who? As long as as gmail has IMAP, gmail -app is useless and definitely not 'essential' in any rational sense.
On Samsung Android 9 it slows to a crawl within 24 hours. Solution? Reinstall Android 8.
On Teclast p10HD it simply crashes, solution? Swap it for a M30 (Teclast's Android 8 tablet)
Huawei? I'm force restarting regularly to defeat there app killer, so I don't know which way it would go.
On TV boxes (I use them in a cluster as cheap boxes), I keep them on Android 7 and on a private net to stop them upgrading.
Android 7 worked well, but each new iteration of Android seems to be worse and worse. Bad choices, ongoing issues patched not addressed.
The core problem is Android. The user never gets to say when they've finished with an app, and so it should be closed. There is no 'exit' menu event. The software is always second guessing the users wishes. False positives and false negatives abound. Its a basic design flaw. Users WANT apps to be closed, but they also want apps not to be closed, UP TO THE USER, not some vague AI in the Android OS!
It's a POS. Not only that the RAM limit is 512Mb, its impossible to use the 12GB memory on these big phones, you can never run enough apps in the background to fill that memory.
A lot of the core problems are Google's. The basic design of 'let Android figure out when to close apps' is a design flaw that was never addressed.
They made it worse when they removed "android.permission.PERSISTENT_ACTIVITY" which allowed an app to specify that it needed to stay loaded.
That became even worse when they decided to minimize RAM usage for AndroidOne devices with 128Mb ram, devices which failed to sell.
The hack the OEMs are doing shouldn't be necessary because the OS should let users "finish" with apps, and unload them.
"Recent Apps" is a confused mashup of "frequently used apps" and "running apps" and it needs to be sorted, not twiddled with.
I have yet to find an Android tablet or device I can use as a professional working product. I am reluctant to upgrade, for sake for seeing what incompetent shit the next version of Android brings.
"I have yet to find an Android tablet or device I can use as a professional working product. I am reluctant to upgrade, for sake for seeing what incompetent shit the next version of Android brings."
Better prepare yourself, then. The increased memory usage of even the most basic apps make even 2GB pretty much useless for everything but a one-trick pony (at which point, why use an Android phone). I was forced to abandon my Note 4 because of this and a network glitch specific to those models.
Unless you're willing to throw up your hands and say, "Stop the Internet! I wanna get off!"
largeHeap limit is only 512MB, it reaches 512 and then poof, the app gets killed. Without largeHeap specified in the manifest, its far less (256? 128?). I would love to use 2GB on a single process. I believe the limit is still in Samsung's tablet S6.
It's one of the most annoying limits ever. I use Android TV boxes for number crunching, and have to multiple process instances, to get the full use of the box. If I ever let those boxes upgrade to one of these background killer devices (e.g. Android 9), it would not keep more than 4 of those processes running!
I regret using Android, it did not follow the path of upgrading I was expecting, instead it does less and less with each cycle as Google tries for force it to a low end market. Android One, later Android Go. Failures in the market place that strangle Android.
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/application-element
"android:largeHeap
Whether your application's processes should be created with a large Dalvik heap...Most apps should not need this and should instead focus on reducing their overall memory usage for improved performance"
Dear Google, Ram is fast and plentiful and dirt cheap, loading and unloading from flash is slow and painful. Calculating temp derivative cache data is expensive and uses lots of battery on each reload. Stop talking shite. You cannot write complex apps on Android because of insane choices like this. You cannot ensure software continues to run, you cannot ensure it won't get arbitrarily killed, you cannot make it fast with precalculated memory structures, because of your choices.
I'm waiting on the August release of the Samsung Tab S7, its supposed to be a big screen tablet with Android 10 on it, but I bet it :
a) won't have a big screen, I think companies have a deal with MS to not produce big screen tablets, whenever they renegotiate their Windows license, they announce a big screen tablet that gets killed off quickly.
b) will have the same limits as Android devices, including the 512MB limit.
That won't be a problem for the tablet, I want it for displaying not number crunching, but the memory leaks and slowdowns on Android 9 are a killer issue even on the tablets. I notice, for example, their webview has a huge memory footprint in A9 suddenly, without any noticeable change in performance.
I wish Bluestacks would give me an exit strategy here. I spend far too much effort fixing up Google's shit choices. Effort I would rather spend on algos and code and modelling.
Something tells me you're trying to squeeze blood out of a rock. Why not just get yourself a used laptop, max out its memory, put Linux or whatever on it, and have done with it? Your screen will be larger, you'll get a beefier machine under the bonnet, and you'll have more control over your destiny.
I think you can still purchase simple ARM-based Linux laptops for inexpensive prices. I did that a few years ago to produce a couple of L-boxen that were used to program hardware devices during manufacturing. Set them up with a "click me" icon basically. useful because they were heap and had screens, and techs could just mouse-click the button... and it was WAY cheaper than building a custom piece of hardware to do the same thing.
I'm pretty sure you can still find ones like that, of the 'netbook' variety. Might have to install a different distro, though, but nothing too difficult (the netbooks I got came with a simple console-only Linux distro). Devuan/Mate would be my choice.
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