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

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days 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 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days 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 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days 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 5 days 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.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

God, I wish. Every Android update seems to undo all of the app run configuration I do on bloatware: disabling background network access, disabling background running, etc. If I can't uninstall it, I limit the fuck out of it and hope. I wish Android would aggressively kill these things.

However, I get that your issue is that it's killing stuff you don't want it to. Are you allowing notifications for background apps? I think that, even in Lineage, to stay active and prevent sleeping an app has to show a persistent notification. I hate the things, since they only clutter the notification lists, but when I disable them the apps don't stay running.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

Are you allowing notifications for background apps?

I do. However permanent notifications was usually a workaround on OEM modified versions of Android that had a more agressive process killing policies and on stock Android this usually wasn't needed at all. And many apps which use push notifications don't run a constant background service, but instead run some checks at regular intervals like e-mail apps. I use K-9 mail which checks e-mails every hour and I stopped receiving notifications after the Android 15 update.

I reflashed the ROM yesterday with a newer nightly build and used Basic NikGapps instead of MindTheGapps so I will see if the situation gets better. For now I seem to be receiving notifications from Protonmail, but that may be only because their app is maybe using Google play services for notifications.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

Hmmm. The last time I had stock was several versions ago. I made a bad choice and have a Samsung now, and it's always required the persistent notification, or it kills the apps.

That's not worth much, though. Samsung's Android is probably the shittiest I've used. I'll be damned if I'm going to replace a perfectly good phone, though; the hardware is good.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

I have GrapheneOS and haven't been having such problems. It does aggressively kill apps when I kill them from the recent apps menu swipe thing but that's expected behaviour. I don't understand how having a notification is what's keeping an app alive.

In developer settings their is an option called background process limit that limits the number of processes that will run in background. Check that see if it makes any changes.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

I don't understand how having a notification is what's keeping an app alive.

Do you remember notifications that couldn't be swiped away in older Android versions? Their point was to keep their app alive. They still exist and still work the same way, keeping their app alive until it cancels the notification, except they can now be dismissed like any other notification (which doesn't really have any effect other than hiding it from you - it will still keep the app alive even when hidden).

It's possible that it's broken in AOSP for some reason, but developer documentation says it should work like this and it does indeed work like this on stock Google ROMs on Pixels.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 5 days ago

I also have GrapheneOS, but have been noticing that it would (for example) annoyingly kill Voyager when I'm in the middle of writing a comment and task switch to Firefox to copy a URL or something. I switch back and it's back on the home feed with a message that it "recovered" my comment text, but of course I have no hope of finding the thing I wanted to reply to again...

This is on a Pixel 7 that should have plenty of RAM, BTW.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

I am running 22.2-20250714-NIGHTLY-surya.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I think this is sort of expected with android 15. Google just hates all background processes except their own which they whitelist. I saw a bunch of changelogs for apps i use that needed patching after 15 released for calyxos.

There is also this setting (top entry) in the developer options, but thats probably not it.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

Yea, I don't think that's it.

Those settings have always been disabled, they're useful for testing, or for low memory phones (which don't really exist anymore).

[-] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

Works fine for me.

Obviously you don't want to swipe them away from the task switcher. You can go to other apps, but swiping away an app means closing it.

It's like minimize vs close on PCs.

this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025

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