Killing background tasks is great and Android does that automatically to save battery usage. But these manufacturers have implemented their own functionality on top of Android which cripples even critical messaging applications like WhatsApp, Slack, Gmail by not delivering Instant Messages notifications instantly.
Just as an example, only chat/messenger apps on my Oneplus with saver enabled (default):
- Skype - always killed
- Slack - always killed
- Whatsapp - sometimes killed, rarely
- Telegram - never killed
- FB Messenger - never killed
All these are fully featured apps with tons of different functionality.
Telegram and FBM never ever trigger "this app is draining your battery" while Skype triggers it regularly when I sometimes start it on phone.
I'm going to generalize and say that probably some apps are simple bad and need to be fixed instead of granting them exceptions and allowing to be battery hogs.
Those apps are explicitly whitelisted by OnePlus. There's nothing to "fix" they're by the app developer, because the killing algorithm chooses based on app name, not app battery consumption. Facebook can kill your whole battery and you'll never get a warning.
So you are saying that behind visible list of apps that are either "optimized" or excluded there is another hidden list where app that is "optimized" could be actually excluded? Ok, that can be a working hypothesis. Why is Skype not excluded the same way then? Or Slack? Millions use them and MS surely has money to promote their app this way. Why Whatsapp is not excluded? It's owned by FB.
Though they were moving away from that model to a model where apps alive for more than a certain time interval in background were killed. So apps which you use the most heavily are more likely to be penalized.
Interesting information. I'm not doubting you here but want to clarify one thing, to understand. After you contacted Oneplus and were added to whitelist, do you still see that your app is showing as "optimized" in the settings but app behavior changed and it is no longer killed in background? And that same is applicable to other major software?
I don't know why it's not there, I'm not an exec in those companies. I know for sure that OnePlus, Huawei and Xiaomi have such whitelists. Other OEMs might have them as well.
This isn't climate change debate, it's easy to check.
I've had a Nokia 6.1 on Pie, apparently the worst-case scenario for this, for a few months. The third-party optimiser is running, and I haven't problems with Slack or Jabber clients. How are people reproducing this behaviour?
It does happen on oneplus devices and it's quite common to find complaints on oneplus forums like : https://bit.ly/2VSkhty . In all cases it is solved by adding these apps to the whitelist.
If you aren't facing issues then these apps are probably already a part of the whitelist on your device.
