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Comment by zlynx | Hacker News Reader

On the first hand, I really appreciate the 30 - 40 hours of battery runtime my Pixel 5 has now. Restricting background apps is a big part of this.

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If only there were some way to let the phone's owner decide what apps were allowed to run in the background, we could all be happy.

It takes about 15 seconds of googling to find out that yes, the user can decide what apps are allowed to run in the background. It's just that now, it's not "every app by default" and instead "what apps a user selects".

Nope. It's Google apps. Users aren't asked for a choice there.

And then maybe "what app a user selects", if the user manages to follow the procedure.

It depends on the phone. Lots of problems with eg the COVID-19 exposure notification apps where firmware updates from Android OEMs were needed to whitelist the apps, the user accessible background settings weren't enough to keep them working.

If instead of googling for 15 seconds you had any real experience about developing apps that need to run in the background (like I do), you would know that this 'background running' is a joke.

The only way to run an app non-stop is to have a persistent notification. And even then, apps are killed off left and right by the likes of Samsung. See https://dontkillmyapp.com for more details

There is. You can disable battery optimizations per-app, if that's what you mean.

Is this possible on a rooted device?

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