This stuff drives me so mad. I recently have noticed higher than usual over-night drain on my phone and decided to investigate a bit. So I connected my phone to my machine, closed out all the apps waited a few seconds and ran adb shell top with a few parameters to see what is actually running.
And would you look at that, despite the phone telling me that nothing is running at all, the microsoft copilot, ebay kleinanzeigen (a german craigslist), google photos and google search either have not been closed or somehow started themselves. Also I have not received any notifications for these Apps in the last few seconds.
First of all, how are these Apps even doing it? With the two Google Apps I kinda get it, since they are System Apps, but in the case of ebay Kleinanzeigen and microsoft copilot it makes 0 sense since they are regular 3rd party Apps. How can they bypass seemingly all optimizations and start themselves (I haven’t used the Microsoft copilot app in months). Also is there any way to prevent this from happening or at the very least get some kind of summary how often these Apps ran in the background. Sadly the Android battery information page is totally useless. With many of these Apps I don’t care about notifications or anything and I never want them to run after I close them in the task manager.
In addition, apps schedule background work through WorkManager or JobScheduler or AlarmManager. Those can wake the app up at specific times designated to do this work. E.g. every X minutes when the screen is off.
Android has never had the same application execution model as traditional OSes. Both for foreground and background work. This allows it to scale multitasking with the available resources, mostly RAM, without losing app/user data. In other words Android can work on a 512MB RAM device or 8GB device and the only obvious difference would be how many apps are kept in memory. No data will be lost in either case due to apps getting evicted out of RAM. I typically give a 3-hour lecture to my interns on this because they need to know the details but that’s what it boils down to. 😂
Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation. If I understand it correctly, there is no way to really prevent these Apps from “running” in the background, although “running” just means they sit idle in memory 99.9% of time and don’t do anything unless a broadcast event they are subscribed to gets fired and then they are permitted to do small task.
So I guess the most likely issue is that either something else on the phone is causing this drain or that some App constantly gets restarted (which is expensive) for some reason instead of just staying idle in memory.
You don’t use the Mull browser do you? That caused this issue for me, and I fixed it by uninstalling and switching to another firefox based browser (it was a Mull issue not a firefox issue)
And people wonder why I root?
Its the only realistic way to control broadcast receivers.
Some apps register for shit like “screen on” or “battery status”, both happen constantly.
Only other way on a non-rooted phone is to install those apps into the work profile (using an app like Island), and deactivate the work profile when not using those apps.
And people wonder why I root?
It’s really maddening having to root just to get a say on what is happening on your device, isn’t it?
Anyway, what app do you use to control the broadcast receivers?
Uninstall them maybe? Especially if you don’t use them.
in the case of the Microsoft copilot app, yes obviously, but there are some Apps which I need like for my bank.
Debloat your phone with UAD maybe, no root require, you can simply disable an app instead of really uninstall it, it’s safer
My samsung S21 has the option to restrict an app and prevent it from ever running in the background, maybe that would do it if your phone has a similar option?
