freeamfva: Phone makers are breaking your favorite apps

Phone makers are breaking your favorite apps

28 Jun 2021 at 21:18

Phone makers are breaking your favorite apps


Battery life has been an Android bugbear for years. While Google has made some significant changes to its mobile OS to improve things (with success, I'd argue), many popular smartphone makers still feel the need to take further steps to enhance longevity — and it's coming at a cost. Many go above and beyond the battery life enhancements featured in so-called "stock" Android, and frequently these alterations cause problems, resulting in issues ranging from delayed notifications, to prematurely killed apps, and even outright breaking behaviors that developers rely on. In fact, the lack of predictability that has ensued under the current laissez-faire power management scheme has become so dire that it recently took the top spot in a developer AMA request thread for Android 11 on reddit. Ultimately, this results in an inconsistent experience for both app-makers and end-users like you and me, and Google needs to put its foot down.To get more news about Android Keyword Ranking Optimization Serve, you can visit aso700.com official website.


For a bit of context, back in 2015, Google implemented a feature called Doze with Android 6.0. In essence, it was one of the first times that Android seriously broke the behavior apps could plan around when it came to running in the background, suspending them in a sort of deep sleep mode when the phone was unplugged, stationary, or otherwise not in use. The feature demonstrably improved idle battery life, but apps had to start specifically planning around the effect it would have. Still, it was a single set standard bundled into stock Android that developers could work around with things like Firebase.


Starting in Android 8.0 Oreo, Google further imposed background execution limits that trimmed down the sort of resources available to apps when they aren't active and in the foreground, and developers that needed to keep their apps or services active in the background had to use an ongoing notification to do it. It was a bit annoying, but in its own way, that was an elegant solution: Developers could keep background functionality, but they had to be more up-front about it, and users were continuously aware of it via that notification.
By themselves, these sorts of changes may have broken certain behaviors developers relied on, but they weren't really a problem. They were defined, documented, and predictable — developers could modify their apps to plan around these new rules because they knew what to expect.


However, Android as a platform has always allowed manufacturers to make tweaks and on top of the "stock" system, and most of them have taken that opportunity to add their own unique behavioral changes to try to further improve their products' battery life. Some simply modify a few of Android's variables to stretch out the time between scheduled wakes, others impose whole "intelligent" systems with machine learning models that dynamically adjust multiple variables in a way that's ostensibly tuned so that customers won't notice it. The problem is that even with the best tricks, these changes can break things for both customers and app developers.
Anecdotally, many of us are probably familiar with issues like delayed notifications, which is one of the details most commonly affected by these sorts of changes — things like seeing notifications for messages or app alerts land minutes after they should. As an example, it's an issue that OnePlus devices have suffered for a long time. Pretty much all of us at Android Police with OnePlus devices recognize delayed notifications as a problem with Oxygen OS and the company's phones. And it's kind of a bummer: Notifications are one of Android's biggest advantage as a platform, and pretty much everyone agrees it's way better than the notification experience on iOS. Yet Google gives phone manufacturers free rein to ruin it.
Notifications aren't the only things that are affected, though. Applications that run in the background like activity or sleep trackers (and even media broadcasters like Hulu or Netflix, in my experience) can run into problems with being prematurely killed as a result of overly aggressive power management.


You can usually fix these issues on a per-app basis by disabling "battery optimization" in Settings (though Oxygen OS has a record of wiping your exemptions). But it's unreasonable to expect customers to tweak settings for apps to work as they should normally. And for folks that aren't too tech-savvy, this is a pretty deeply hidden setting — Google's intent was clearly for it not to be frequently changed, and yet some manufacturers force you to just to make apps behave more normally.



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