Android 15 (Lineage OS) agressively kills apps (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I updated my device to Lineahe OS based on Android 15 after I have been using Lineage OS based on Android 14 for a while. I don't know if this is a common issue with Android 15 or it's only with Lineage OS or my installation is sonewhat crippled (I did clean flash and I already reinstalled once), but the OS is very aggressively killing apps compared to Android 14 to the point it is annoying.

Example

In Android 14 if I started a download in the browser, the browser would display a permanent notification that it's downloading and if I swiped away the browser from recents the download would continue. In Android 15 the downloading stops immidiately after I swipe the browser from recents.

And that's not the only problem. Background services like my companion watch app don't work properly because it seems they get killed in the background and messaging or e-mail apps sometimes seem to have the same problem. I tried disabling battery optimizations for these apps, but it doesn't seem to help at all.

Does anyone else experience similar issues with Android 15?

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[-] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

why would swiping away an app not kill it? why would you do that? leave it be until it's done wtf

how much RAM you got? on my two A15 phones with 6 and 8 GB RAM nothing extraordinary happens in that regard, whereas my A15 4 GB RAM tablet can't handle a lot of open apps and OOM kills some in the background.

edit: you seem to be trying to run android apps like desktop apps. that doesn't work here. how things work is most apps are dormant when they don't have focus and when they receive a push message e.g. "you have a new message", their handler wakes up, fetches stuff from the server and updates local state (and then optionally displays the notification).

so you either need to install unified push and get apps that support it or have e.g. microG implement a subset of Play services so that GCM/FCM works with "normal" apps. the third option, what you may be doing, is having every app excluded from sleep and doing their own updates checking.

the example where you close an app and then go "why app closed" is unrelated.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

why would swiping away an app not kill it? why would you do that? leave it be until it's done wtf

how much RAM you got? on my two A15 phones with 6 and 8 GB RAM nothing extraordinary happens in that regard, whereas my A15 4 GB RAM tablet can't handle a lot of open apps and OOM kills some in the background.

EDIT: I tested the same with my file explorer while moving files, but the task didn't get killed. This might jusz be issue with the browser.

All the stock Android versions I used until Android did not kill tasks that are run with a persistent notification. Swiping away killed the app activity, but it did not stop its tasks or services.

My device has 6GB RAM and I never had such behavior.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

why would swiping away an app not kill it? why would you do that? leave it be until it's done wtf

Because if an app has a permanent notification, it cannot get killed. Before Android 15 or 14, you couldn't even swipe such notifications away - the idea was that the app was forced to tell the user it's running.

Then Android added a list of apps running in the background and allowed users to dismiss the permanent notifications, but the behavior is still the same - an app can keep itself alive until it removes the notification on its own or gets force killed either by doze or from the settings.

So swiping away a browser after you initiate a download is a perfectly valid use case that is intended to work without any problems. If it doesn't, then it's a bug either in LineageOS or in the browser.

Also, I can confirm this works perfectly fine on stock Android 16 ROM on a Pixel with Vivaldi browser - the download finished, and then Vivaldi got killed, because nothing was keeping it alive after it cancelled its download notification.

this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025

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