Optimum use of battery on Android phones is important for OEM’s to prevent any unnecessary draining of battery when not needed or intended by the user. Google has been working on how to create a balance between running of only important apps and terminating ones that are battery drainers. The optimizations like Doze and App Standby Buckets are there in place to allocate system resources to apps that actually need it. OEM’s however, take the app killing a bit too far by additionally killing apps in the backdrop as a part of their battery conserving mechanisms.
Urbandroid released the DontKillMyApp in Play Store last year to give users an insight of what apps are being over aggressively killed, to ensure important third-party app functions are not hindered. In a way it is a benchmarking test for your smartphone to see if the manufacturer’s own OS skin is not aggressively killing favorite installed apps.
Google has also realized this problem, as it’s been found out, some OEM’s keep a whitelist of their associate apps while rampantly killing others in a biased way. Apps like Facebook or WhatsApp run unrestricted, while a genuinely good app is forced to be killed – putting the small developers at a disadvantage.
To check these shoddy practices by OEM’s Google wants to take more control of how apps are manage in the background. For this, they have created a feedback webpage where developers can report any such instances, and even name particular OEMs who put third-party apps at a disadvantage.
Google wants to streamline the resource management as a part of the upcoming Android 12 OS, and remove any unethical practices by phone manufacturers. Big names like Samsung, Nokia, Xiaomi and OnePlus have been known to indulge in over-aggressive killing of third-party apps while whitelisting their own favored apps.
