Room

Liskov

Date

28.10.2022

Time

16:50 > 40 min

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A cold-blooded war is raging on Android between “what users can do with their devices” and “how much their device lasts on one charge”. Each new Android OS version is less merciful to your background processes. Different OEMs kill your apps straight away without asking whether you do something useful for your users or not. New weapons of mass destruction are being invented year by year. Their names? Doze mode V1!, Doze mode V2!, Background restrictions!, Adaptive battery! and more are coming this year whose evil names are yet to be known. But we can already imagine their devastating powers.

Some OEMs are more cruel than others. The darkest warlords of them all? Samsung, Huawei, OnePlus and Xiaomi in that order. They employ elite trained assassins called app killers whose insidious ways are yet to be documented.

It seems impossible to survive, but there is hope. A small group of relentless developers (let’s call them the Resistance) gathered around a project called dontkillmyapp.com. They have risen up against the evil hordes of pkill -9. They have years of experience with long running processes and alarms on Android since the carefree times of Cupcake till the dawn of Tiramisu. And they are here to share tips and guides with users and developers on how to survive in these dark times.

On Stardate 2020.7 we released a benchmark app to measure the level of dark practices different OEM-overlords use directly on the affected phones. And no later than Stardate 2022.7 we passed the force field of "Google review process" only to merge it directly into Android's source code within the CTS module - known as Compatibility Test Suite (or Carpal Tunnel Syndrome?).

Now we (the developers from the Light side) can use this new Force to defend our apps. Every one of us can use the the Force of CTS-D (CTS-Defender Module) tests and even submit new tests and show the whole Galaxy who is killing apps and how!

Viva la Resistance!
P.S. we also have cookies and a guitar song at the end!