I am writing this article mainly for a friend in the US I have sent a Xiaomi Redmi 9T to as a gift, after giving it a lot of tweaks (photo album compiled specifically for this friend).
This article shows how to make sure your apps get run and not killed on a mobile device. I believe the principle should be the same whether it’s Android, iOS, or any other mobile OS, but here Xiaomi’s MIUI variant of Android is assumed. The screenshots and videos were taken on my Redmi Note 10 Pro, which runs Xiaomi.eu ROM (euROM) 12.5.9.
Mobile OS developers try not to let apps run as much as possible to suppress energy consumption and provide better performance. They do it in two ways:
- not allow apps to automatically run, and
- kill them, if they are already running, as soon as possible.
This strategy works, but if the apps you want to get automatically started do not, or those that are already running get killed midway by the system against your will, it defeats the purpose of having a mobile device.
The developers know this, and exempt certain apps from this strategy by applying simple heuristics. However, it is not perfect. That’s why some people wonder, for example, “Why don’t I get notified at once when there is an incoming message on Whatsapp?”
Generally speaking, I believe you want to have the following kinds of apps be exempt from the energy-saving strategy above:
- emergency alert systems
- instant messaging systems
- SNSs (personally I do not care about them at all, but I know many do)
- always-on servers of sorts (perhaps not for the general public, but some like to have them running)
Earlier I said that the OS tries to save energy by two tactics. On MIUI, to exempt an app from the energy-saving strategy, you have to exclude it from each tactic entirely separately. The exclusion from non-auto-start is considered a matter of permissions, and the exclusion from automatic killing is considered a matter of battery optimization.
In the following two videos, I am going to show how to exclude Whatsapp from the two tactics.
Personally, I let Whatsapp and KakaoTalk automatically run, but let them be killed. Those are the instant messaging apps I hardly ever use. I just need to make sure I will eventually notice it if somebody should message me there. The notification does not need to be instant.
The more I know about MIUI, the more aware I get that I need to be mindful of the autostart permissions. For example, I am quite surprised to learn that Android Accessibility Suite is not given autostart permission by default (see image). Some apps that depend on it reported that the service was “malfunctioning.” When you see such a message, you will not instantly think that it is because the service was not allowed to start.
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