Samsung is aggressively working on improving its custom skin, Android 14-based custom Skin based One UI 6. Here, the company aims to improve how the device handles background apps. Here is a quick summary: these apps keep running actively in the background, like music apps playing in the background. But some unnecessary apps also run in the background, consuming many of the device’s resources. For this, Samsung kills background apps more frequently than Android devices.
This causes frustration for both users and developers. With Android 14 comes an optimization way background apps work more consistently across all devices. The company does kill background activity to save battery. This results in a poor user experience because the app is designed to run in the background, but it may be killed by the system. This is one of the most common issues on Android devices. Whereas some developers misuse the ability to run their apps in the background, which causes battery life issues and performance to suffer.
Sometimes, it breaks the functionality of a certain app and frustrates developers who follow Android development guidelines. With Google’s partnership with Samsung to implement this quality-of-life feature, partnering with Samsung has confirmed on its developer website it creates a unified policy to ensure a more consistent and reliable user experience for Galaxy users. If developers follow the new foreground services API policy, their apps will be guaranteed to work as intended on Android 14.
One UI 6 will kill background apps less often.
Android app developers have guidelines for creating apps that work fine in the background but still run into problems. Different OEMs have their own restrictions or inconsistencies in handling background apps, making it difficult for developers to understand how to develop apps that will be fine on those devices. To address the issues, Android OEMs aggressively kill background apps to conserve battery life.
Users complain to OEMs about how aggressive background app killing is affecting their battery and causing problems like battery drain. Google partnered with Samsung to
To ensure APIs for background work are supported predictably and consistently across the Android ecosystem, as long as Android’s new foreground service API policy is followed, apps will work as well as possible. Companies are trying to make it easier for developers to create apps that work consistently across different Android devices, benefiting developers and users.
Android 14 will improve Google to improve Background activity.
The Android 14 Developers Preview aims to improve the user experience. These changes include new requirements for apps to declare foreground service types and request type-specific permissions for services that run in the foreground of the user’s screen and therefore have higher priority than background services. Another change is the new user-initiated data transfer that will manage large uploads and downloads more smoothly by leveraging JobScheduler’s constraints, such as using unmetered Wi-Fi to ensure that large transfers are only initiated when the user is on a reliable and faster network.
Lastly, Google Play Policies are designed to ensure the appropriate use of foreground services and user-initiated data transfer jobs to ensure that apps are using these features in a way that is consistent with the guidelines set out by Google. Google gathered a lot of feedback based on Android 13 Developer APIs through the Issue Tracker and Contributed CTS-D tests to address the consistently reported issues. Google aims to improve these with the Android platform and help developers create apps that work consistently across various devices and hardware configurations.
However, no exact details are shared on how these changes will affect how the OS handles background apps and services. App developers must follow the guidelines, work properly with background service types, and request type-specific permissions. It will benefit both brands, app developers, and users.
Samsung has implemented more intelligent and efficient background app management, which will help improve device battery life and performance. With One UI 6, users will see a lot better experience and address a common frustration among users and developers on Android devices. This will also encourage other Android OEMs to better optimize their software by implementing more intelligent and efficient background app management, which will help prevent apps from breaking due to the aggressive killing of background apps.
