The one that bothers me most is that background services are now management by some AI thingy, in order to 'optimize battery usage'. Ergo, background services are now unreliable.
As an example, Facebook Messenger has become almost completely unusable on Android phones because the OS keeps killing the process despite the user specifically telling it to don't.
This varies heavily by phone manufacturer. They employ different strategies to inflate their battery life stats, and Samsung is currently the worst offender: https://dontkillmyapp.com/
Why does facebook need a background service? Isn't there one global notification service that is super reliable and gets messages for all apps using it?
Somewhat ironic as this sort of issues started becoming more prevalent on the Linux desktop once distros started adopting sytemd-oomd and Facebook is the one that submitted portions of their oomd solution to systemd.
few years ago when I got rid of all FB apps from phone (can't recommend enough), main reason was that their apps were draining battery hard, even when not used (when deciding whether it was so much spying of devs incompetency I'll be nice and tend to incompetency). Maybe its still the case?
Its bad that platform that is supposed to be more free alternative is not so much so. Similar story with me and Strava - when I record some walking, Samsung's latest android 13 sometimes tends to kill after some time the tracking thread. So my maps sometimes look like I invented teleport, pretty annoying and made the app useless and unused. I checked and Strava doesn't have any settings for this enabled.
I thought phones had hooks for notifications n stuff regardless of if the app was open. Shouldn’t that cover most things you care about in the background? Am I wrong or is this different for Android (I’ve only used apple)?
Well for a messages app it either needs a background service polling the server for new messages or it needs to use Firebase Cloud Messaging. AFAIK, FCM is essentially a service running on your phone that receives messages from Google's servers and forwards them to your apps. And backend servers can send messages to those Google servers.
