- Google and Samsung are promising consistent and reliable app background behavior in One UI.
- These changes are promised to go into effect with One UI 6.0 based on Android 14.
- The background services of your favorite apps will perform reliably on the upcoming update and won’t be randomly terminated.
Android’s foundation is built on freedom and choice, manifesting itself in how OEMs can take open-source Android and customize it to their customer’s liking through Android UX skins. One side-effect of this approach has been the wildly inconsistent behavior for foreground and background apps and services. Google is now taking one step toward fixing this inconsistency, as it has announced a deeper partnership with Samsung for its upcoming Android 14-based One UI 6.0 update.
App developers and end users have long been unhappy with how some OEMs can be very aggressive in how they treat background services. Apps like instant messaging apps and others are frequently killed in the background, causing users to miss important messages and more. It’s a bad experience for everyone, further exacerbated by how different this behavior can be across the various UX skins that are present in the Android ecosystem.