Samsung has made great strides in recent years in building its One UI skin as one of the best versions of Android on the market. Well, it looks like things are going in the wrong direction. Apparently, Samsung introduced some aggressive background app elimination policies on Android 11 that topped the charts in the worst ways.
Don’tKillMyApp is an independent website that ranks Android OEMs based on how they handle application management in the background. The site looks at how AOSP and Google’s own Pixels deal with background apps, and from there, looks at how top OEMs change the platform for the worse, causing users to see their background apps closed unexpectedly.
For years, that list has remained pretty much the same, with Android makers like Sony and Nokia sitting comfortably in low positions (the lower the better), while more aggressive changes from Xiaomi, Asus, Oppo and others have gained higher positions. Huawei led the list for a long time, with OnePlus in second place and Samsung well behind. Well, that has changed.
Samsung is now in first place when it comes to aggressively killing background apps, thanks to the changes the company made in the Android 11 update. A new restriction implemented by Samsung prevents apps from locking the wake lock on foreground services . This change, which is enabled by default, is described as a “severe deviation from standard Android process management policies” and may result in some background apps breaking, including some health apps that may lose the ability to collect data from the sensor.
Fortunately, there is an alternative solution. Users can dive into several pages of different settings (Settings> Applications> Your application> Battery> Battery optimization> All applications> [App Name] > Don’t optimize) and disable battery optimization.
Notably, this happened after Google said it would take steps to prevent exactly this type of behavior from its Android partners. Clearly, Samsung did not receive the memo or disregard it entirely.
As someone who has been using the latest Samsung Galaxy S21 devices and a Galaxy Z Fold 2 in recent months, I can’t say that I noticed these problems directly. However, this may be directly related to the fact that all Samsung devices have an exuberant amount of RAM, making the background apps stand alone. This problem is probably clearer on Samsung’s less expensive devices.
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