Tuesday, 29 May 2018

Android Oreo killing background services and clears pending alarms, scheduled jobs after entering doze mode

My app has a background service running that gets users current location and update it to a server every five minutes. To run this location update process continuously, I use alarm manager to set its next execution time from the service itself. However, when I install the app in my Nokia 6 running Android 8.1 it works for some time and if I keep the phone idle for some time, my service will get killed with the next alarms by the application also being cleared from system alarm manager. My guess was that the idle time makes the phone enter doze mode. However, I don't understand why the alarm managers got cleared. To my understanding, the doze mode should open up maintenance windows periodically to execute any pending tasks.

To mitigate this issue, I tried to apply a Job Scheduler service on top of Alarm Manager, which runs every 15 minutes. Purpose of this job scheduler was to re-start the service which has the alarm manager in it, so even if it gets killed and the alarm is cleared, job scheduler would re-up the service.

After I tested this patch and keeping it for some time to go into idle mode, it resulted in getting both Job Scheduler Service and Service which has the alarm in it killed with the scheduled jobs and alarms getting cleared from the system.

It is said in the Android documentation that we can use JobScheduler to mitigate its background execution limitations. And to test this out I forced killed the two services when I tested the app, but the already scheduled job did not get cleared, and it made the service with the alarm run again successfully. I don't understand the reason for this behavior, although the Evernote guys give an explanation that could match this scenario in here Android Job by Evernote

Any ideas for this abnormal behavior?

Test Environment Details

  • Device : Nokia 6 (TA-1021)
  • OS : Android 8.1.0


from Android Oreo killing background services and clears pending alarms, scheduled jobs after entering doze mode

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