Android vendors, don’t kill my app

For our Zombies, Run! run tracking/audio adventure app, "battery management" is turning into our most consistent customer complaint, to the point where it's impacting review scores, active users, and probably subscriptions. The result of the changes made by Huawei, OnePlus, Xiaomi, and Samsung mean that our app is killed during runs, and people interpret that as the app crashing. We're trying to figure out the best way of telling users how to change their battery settings (which, for the avoidance…

Previous: Android vendors, don’t kill my app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18901006 - Jan 2019 (407 comments) I'm not sure if it's been updated since then. Still lists Sony as "toxic" for having an opt-in battery extension feature which warns you of the trade-offs (which I've found very useful when I really wanted to, well, extend battery life, e.g. when hiking or travelling). I told them this back in 2019, and that they got this so utterly wrong AND have failed to fix…

I'm just going out on a limb here to say that perhaps OS vendors took a stance when app developers clearly demonstrated that they would never give a rat's ass about how much battery or other resources they gobbled up unless the OS made that decision for them. Just sayin' I ran into this a couple of times from the POV of apps which did something useful, and had to use hacks/workarounds to avoid being killed off. So they had…

So, I finally found an answer why did my favorite alarm app (Sleep as Android, which I highly recommend) stop working after my Nokia 6.1 updated to Android 9. I mean, I did have troubles with background applications before the update such as heart rate monitoring. But the firmware was so laggy so I didn't care about it. But breaking an alarm application? This is kinda next level, I'm really pissed off. I hated the phone before Android Pie for…