DontKillMyApp is a benchmark to test how badly your phone handles background apps

Smartphone companies come up with even more exuberant claims about long-lasting batteries with each new device. Inarguably, the battery sizes on smartphones have increased substantially over the past years – that’s why the popularity of tools like Greenify has dwindled over the years. However, to extend the battery backup, manufacturers also tweak their custom Android-based software to kill or put background apps to sleep, and some of them do it really aggressively. One of the victims of the agonizing issue is Urbandroid the developer of Sleep as Android, a smart alarm app. The same developer is launching a new app called “DontKillMyApp” that will help you measure how well can background apps survive on your phone.

The app is named after Urbandroid’s earlier project – a website by the same name meant to highlight how aggressively different manufacturers freeze background apps. While the website gives a more general overview of the aggressive app killing in custom Android skins, the app should give a more contextual and specific picture of how well a phone – and more importantly, your phone – handles background apps.

To run the benchmark, you need to keep the phone idle for some time for the app to test how well background tasks are handled. It lets you choose the duration of the test between an hour and 8 hours and warns you against using the phone or charging it during that period. The app displays a persistent notification and you can stop the benchmark using the same if you need to use the phone.

To test this, the app runs a service in the foreground with the help of a persistent notification, adds wakelock to it, and executes some repeating tasks on the main thread at intervals of 10 seconds. Additionally, the app schedules and alarms for every 8 minutes. At the end of the testing period, it sees how many of those commands have been executed and presents them with a visual graph.

The DontKillMyApp app is currently available in Early Access and you can try it out to see how your phone handles background apps. In the future, we can also expect to see some suggestions within the app about ways to exempt apps from being killed and to keep them running in the background.

Share your results in the comments below! Meanwhile, here’s a gripping editorial on how app developers suffer due to these aggressive battery optimizations.

DontKillMyApp (Free, Google Play) →

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