this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024

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Holy shit Android 14 is really bad (szmer.info)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

56 comments fedilink hide all child comments

No combined notification+ringer volume control? No non-dismissable notifications? ~~No disabling of the bottom search bar?~~ fair point this is launcher issue What the fuck is that shit?!

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Since Android 10 the OS has really gone downhill IMO.

IIRC they have also been ripping out workarounds that people use to keep their apps open, so expect things like Syncthing/OpenVPN/Element/Termux etc to no longer be able to survive in the background - I believe the non dismissable notifications are a part of that too. To me this also means apps using their own push services are now being forced into a position where they'll need to consider Google Cloud Messaging.

The OpenVPN one is pretty poor because unless you have it set to be always-on, Android can kill it freely now, then completely bypass your VPN preference because "it's not working"

These new changes in A14 kind of show everything wrong with having an ad company in charge of a mobile OS

[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Set the battery usage of your essential apps to Unrestricted and your persistence problem is solved. Android has vastly improved its security by cutting off the workarounds shady (and legit) apps have used to persist. Some of these improvement are from GrapheneOS devs hardening the AOSP pipeline and increasing everyone's privacy. You mention VPN apps getting neutered. I've never experienced Wireguard getting killed by Android and I use that app nearly continuously. I also use Syncthing all day. Setting its battery use to unrestricted keeps it working just fine. I use the app's internal options to disable syncing when my battery tapers off. The hacky workarounds you speak of to maintain persistence on A14 should be killed off to improve everyone's privacy.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Set the battery usage of your essential apps to Unrestricted and your persistence problem is solved

The background app battery usage feature (otherwise known as "allow background activity", "battery care", or "Adaptive battery") is a different feature to what I'm talking about here sadly AFAICT, and doesn't affect the relative importance weight of apps when Android's memory management is looking for things to kill.

The only thing that the background app battery usage restriction does is stop "inactive" apps from running in the background if they are using up a lot of CPU time, and if the app is not being interacted with frequently: either directly by the user, indirectly via Google Cloud Messaging, or by another app on the device. From what I can tell, it's completely separate to Android's memory management and solely exists to extend battery life.

Android has vastly improved its security by cutting off the workarounds shady (and legit) apps have used to persist.

Shady apps already persist using Google (Firebase) Cloud Messaging, and this change does not impact them. Even if they are killed by the separate background battery app usage feature, a simple push message typically brings these back.

The hacky workarounds you speak of to maintain persistence on A14 should be killed off to improve everyone's privacy.

I wouldn't exactly categorize this as a hacky workaround, since it follows the documented relative app importance weights used by Android's memory management. Users can even bypass this themselves by swiping on the persistent notification, and hiding those types of app notifications.

If anything IMO it forces apps to be less transparent about their activity, since they cannot communicate to the user that they are running

If I'm wrong about the background battery app feature's seemingly lack of impact on Android's memory management please do let me know - I've yet to come across anything suggesting it does ☹️

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Interesting, thanks

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

and yet plenty of stuff still runs in the background for me, eating my battery when I don't need it to be in the background

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Stop downloading all those free-to-play-pay-to-win games. Basically any app that is advertised for but free to use is going to maximize the amount of data they harvest and the number of "notifications"(ads) they send you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Did they something in their recent API? How come OS van kill background apps if battery set to unrestricted?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

If the foreground apps need the resources (RAM, CPU) the OS will kill apps that are in the background. There used to be various things apps could do to reduce the risk of being killed, but these options have gradually been reduced in recent years.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

No combined notification+ringer volume control? No non-dismissable notifications?

both of those can be seen as a plus for some people, also you always can change the launcher to one without bottom search bar, did people forgot how to customize their android?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (2 children)

From another thread there seems to be animation/gestures issues if you use a third party launcher

https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/9337804

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, unfortunately been a thing since the gesture navigation was implemented. Somewhat recently I've gone back to the three button navigation so I could use Nova but I'm using Pie navigation so I can have the swiping to go back and also gives me some customisability to do some additional actions while swiping.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

If you have Android 13 rooted then you can use Quickswitch module for smooth gesture navigation.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Interesting, on my Fairphone I've never noticed an issue using Nova.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I also use a Fairphone and haven't encountered issues with gestures while using a third party launcher (previously Niagara, now Kvaesitso)

Admittedly I switched the gestures back off anyway because I'm just used to using the on screen buttons for the moment

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

did people forgot how to customize their android?

Sadly yes. It's especially evident to me whenever LineageOS is mentioned as THE way to install a non-standard OS. Not that long ago there were dozens of options for each device and Cyanogenmod (the grandpa of LineageOS) was just one of them, albeit a quite large one.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

yeah, but i'm talking about such minor things like using non stock launcher, custom keyboard etc., anyway custom roms are harder now, OEMs make unlocking bootloader harder, also developing is harder itself with non snapdragon SoCs

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

There used to be an extra switch for linked or unlinked notification+ringer volume. You could use whatever work for you. Now they force you to use separate, which I believe is worse in every way.

Yeah, you can change the launcher, but unfortunately no Android 14 launcher supports smooth gesture navigation or Quickswitch module.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (2 children)

What are non-dismissable notifications? Or more specifically, why would I want those?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Persistent notification for some ongoing processes, such as downloads, torrenting clients, VPN services, all sorts of synchronisation, weather, DND, bedtime mode, battery monitors etc.

I in particular liked to use it with Tasks.org client for non-dismissable reminders, so that they stayed in the notifications bar until I mark them done. This way I would never accidentally dismiss a reminder for a chore until I specifically completed it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I in particular liked to use it with Tasks.org client for non-dismissable reminders, so that they stayed in the notifications bar until I mark them done. This way I would never accidentally dismiss a reminder for a chore until I specifically completed it.

This right here. Exact same use case.

What I've started doing is setting them to re-trigger at random if they've been swiped away. At least then if I accidentally dismiss it, it'll come back in a little while.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Well, that's some solution, thanks . Guess I will do that as well

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

The app should resend reminders until it's completed. This doesn't seem like a big issue.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

It was a way for apps to run without risk of being killed while letting the user easily see that the app was running.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

That sounds like a weird way to get around battery optimizations without having to ask the user to explicitly do that for this app? I mean there is a mechanic for that already via disabling battery optimizations, far as I understand it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Showing a notification doesn't "evade" battery optimization - as battery optimization is completely independent of Android's memory management.

Showing a notification allows Android's memory management to better assess what apps to kill using a weights system, based on whether they are in the foreground or background, if any of the app's overlays/notifications are visible to the user, and exactly how visible they are.

Battery optimization will kill any non-system app based on how frequently it is used, dependent on its overall background CPU usage, regardless of whether the app is showing a notification or not.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Exactly, it was a crappy stop gap solution.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I hated apps that did that. Never really worked anyway. Do your app properly for God's sake!

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I like the dismissible notifications though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

They had a very specific and useful purpose: notify of ongoing processes. Some apps using them wrong sucked, I agree, but since we have already got a lot of customisation for notifications on a per-app basis then perhaps this should be a customizable thing as well

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Oh yes, having customisability for this would be the most ideal situation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Especially since Android 12 or 13 all app notifications require a permission in the first place

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Sounds like a job for LineageOS!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I use Cherish OS which I believe is based on LineageOS source.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (1 children)

So you use a fork of a fork and complain that the main branch is bad?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Yes?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Those are improvements to me.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (3 children)

why would you want non-dismissable notifications?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

One example would be always showing the current weather.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Persistent apps running in the background. One constant complaint many have is background apps that should be left alone killed by battery-saving stuff. One of the ways to prevent this from happening that devs have used is persistent notifications. Killing this option fucks up lots of apps that are supposed to run in the background. I guess i'll stay away from Android 14 for now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

i just go into the app i want to save and select unrestricted instead of optimized if i don't want it to go to sleep.

wasn't the notification thing an exploit anyway?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Some apps have useful information that you can glance using the notification, like Tasker or those Battery monitoring apps. Dismissing those notifications is a pain in the ass for users that use them

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

you can just set the notif and ringer to the same thing the other 2 do suck tho

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

mate, I am fully aware I can do that, but then I am say at work, where it gets loud at times, and therefore wish to have the ringer and notifications call a bit louder than at home. Not only do I have to do that with two different settings, I can't even achieve that using volume buttons and sound panel, but rather have to specifically go to Settings>Sound each time. it's fucking regressive.

And I know some people prefer to have the ringer call loudly and notifications notify silently, but the point is this used to be customisable! It was a switch between linked volume or separate and it worked fine for years. Why enshittify a perfectly well working thing?!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I've been using tasker to manage my ringer profiles for so long I didn't even realize this. When at work (within radius) and connected to the office WiFi the ringer is set to 1 out of 7 level. When out in the manufacturing facility it's disconnected from WiFi and I'm still inside the radius so the ringer goes to 7 out of 7 level. Works like a charm!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Well yeah, "Rules" does this as well, but this only works in repeatable scenario

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (4 children)

that's really weird, it's in the little sound panel for me

I'm using a Pixel, maybe your manufacturer implemented it wrong for some reason

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I don't have a search bar on Graphene OS.

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