Set the battery usage of your essential apps to Unrestricted and your persistence problem is solved

The background app battery usage feature (otherwise known as "allow background activity", "battery care", or "Adaptive battery") is a different feature to what I'm talking about here sadly AFAICT, and doesn't affect the relative importance weight of apps when Android's memory management is looking for things to kill.

The only thing that the background app battery usage restriction does is stop "inactive" apps from running in the background if they are using up a lot of CPU time, and if the app is not being interacted with frequently: either directly by the user, indirectly via Google Cloud Messaging, or by another app on the device. From what I can tell, it's completely separate to Android's memory management and solely exists to extend battery life.

Android has vastly improved its security by cutting off the workarounds shady (and legit) apps have used to persist.

Shady apps already persist using Google (Firebase) Cloud Messaging, and this change does not impact them. Even if they are killed by the separate background battery app usage feature, a simple push message typically brings these back.

The hacky workarounds you speak of to maintain persistence on A14 should be killed off to improve everyone's privacy.

I wouldn't exactly categorize this as a hacky workaround, since it follows the documented relative app importance weights used by Android's memory management. Users can even bypass this themselves by swiping on the persistent notification, and hiding those types of app notifications.

If anything IMO it forces apps to be less transparent about their activity, since they cannot communicate to the user that they are running

If I'm wrong about the background battery app feature's seemingly lack of impact on Android's memory management please do let me know - I've yet to come across anything suggesting it does ☹️

Interesting, thanks

Stop downloading all those free-to-play-pay-to-win games. Basically any app that is advertised for but free to use is going to maximize the amount of data they harvest and the number of "notifications"(ads) they send you.

If the foreground apps need the resources (RAM, CPU) the OS will kill apps that are in the background. There used to be various things apps could do to reduce the risk of being killed, but these options have gradually been reduced in recent years.

Yeah, unfortunately been a thing since the gesture navigation was implemented. Somewhat recently I've gone back to the three button navigation so I could use Nova but I'm using Pie navigation so I can have the swiping to go back and also gives me some customisability to do some additional actions while swiping.

Interesting, on my Fairphone I've never noticed an issue using Nova.

yeah, but i'm talking about such minor things like using non stock launcher, custom keyboard etc., anyway custom roms are harder now, OEMs make unlocking bootloader harder, also developing is harder itself with non snapdragon SoCs

I in particular liked to use it with Tasks.org client for non-dismissable reminders, so that they stayed in the notifications bar until I mark them done. This way I would never accidentally dismiss a reminder for a chore until I specifically completed it.

This right here. Exact same use case.

What I've started doing is setting them to re-trigger at random if they've been swiped away. At least then if I accidentally dismiss it, it'll come back in a little while.

The app should resend reminders until it's completed. This doesn't seem like a big issue.

That sounds like a weird way to get around battery optimizations without having to ask the user to explicitly do that for this app? I mean there is a mechanic for that already via disabling battery optimizations, far as I understand it.

I hated apps that did that. Never really worked anyway. Do your app properly for God's sake!

Oh yes, having customisability for this would be the most ideal situation.

So you use a fork of a fork and complain that the main branch is bad?

i just go into the app i want to save and select unrestricted instead of optimized if i don't want it to go to sleep.

wasn't the notification thing an exploit anyway?

that's really weird, it's in the little sound panel for me

I'm using a Pixel, maybe your manufacturer implemented it wrong for some reason