1y ago

Mishaal Rahman: "Android 14 seems to have quietly eliminated a trick some apps were using to keep themselves alive when the OS tried to kill them"

androiddev.social Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman@androiddev.social)

Attached: 1 image Android 14 seems to have quietly eliminated a trick some apps were using to keep themselves alive when the OS tried to kill them. As spotted by Greenify developer Oasis Feng, Android now freezes a package's cgroup before killing it. Control groups (cgroups) is a Linux kernel feat...

Android @lemdro.id

limerod @reddthat.com

1y ago

Mishaal Rahman: "Android 14 seems to have quietly eliminated a trick some apps were using to keep themselves alive when the OS tried to kill them"

androiddev.social /@MishaalRahman/111383260635578131

-5 4

16 comments

I seriously don't get why this can no longer be controlled by the user. I like my weather and music to be readily available, everything else can be killed
- Android already has a setting for that. Disable battery optimization for apps you want to run in the background. Samsung goes much further with their sleeping, deep sleeping, and never sleeping lists.
  
  I feel like half the time that doesn't work though :/

I'm sure this will have good and bad consequences.
- I think two great ways to manage this are
  1: using permissions the user can see and grant/deny "Allow persistent background usage" or something like that with a tooltip or something that warms the user about resource usage. IIRC, this is already a thing in Android 14.
  2: providing visibility into background app usage and history. They do this to some degree, but it's not as good as it could be. Especially when I want to know what is draining my battery when my phone is in my pocket.
- Mostly bad
  
  It would be good to protect against malware. Bad for apps you legitimately want to run in the background. As usual it seems like a tradeoff between giving the user a choice while not overwhelming uninformed users.

This really was a trick and was mostly exploited.
An app that actually needs being in the background would just show a persistant notification.

16 comments