DontKillMyApp - useful mobile benchmark to check Android background tasks

DontKillMyApp is a useful mobile benchmark. It lets you find out how aggressive your phone is with background processes. The results are available via the report.

What's it for?

What are we talking about? The fact is that the developers of mobile devices claim that their phones are well optimized, the battery is able to store charge for a long time.

At the same time, due to various tweaks, Android behaves aggressively in relation to applications and processes. For example, apps are unloaded from the memory, losing some data. The system does not always behave selectively towards applications.

How DontKillMyApp works

DontKillMyApp allows you to take an unbiased look at Android's performance by letting you know which processes are unloaded over a certain period of time. That's what the test performed by the app is for.

To work with DontKillMyApp you need to find free time and get away from your phone. You cannot charge your phone or use it during the test.

When starting the app, you must specify the duration of the test: an interval of 1 to 8 hours.

During the test notifications will appear on the screen. All useful information is available in real time at intervals of a few minutes.

During the test, DontKillMyApp will run repeating tasks at 10-second intervals. Schedulers and alarms will also be triggered to keep your Android phone active.

Test results

As a result of such testing, the user will see statistics: how well the system and the phone respectively coped with the background processes.

The Report shows the pecrentage of processes were killed and which ones worked.

You can also send the results to the developer's repository. This data is then available to website visitors.

DontKillMyApp site

Essentially, the DontKillMyApp site provides device rankings according to measurements - which device models are more aggressive and which are least aggressive.

According to this information, Samsung leads the anti-rating, followed by OnePlus, Huawei, and Xiaomi.

HTC and Nokia got the best scores - that is, they don't kill processes as aggressively.

By the way, the results of the rating are constantly changing.

What is interesting, for each case (phone model and Android version) there are ways to fix the situation. You can get the information by clicking on the name of the device model.

We advise you to install DontKillMyApp and evaluate how tolerant your phone is to background processes. Pay attention to the device statistics on the DontKillMyApp website. Perhaps you, as a developer, need to analyze which OS models and versions are killing your app in the background.

Interview with Petr Nalevka (Urbandroid Team)

- When have you noticed that Android background processes do not work properly? Has this become a real problem for you as a user or developer?

This was a real problem for me mostly as a developer. As a user I used mostly Nexus and later Pixel devices which are mostly free of app killing issues. The first real trouble started with Stamina Mode and Sony - this was the Pandora box opening situation. Then the biggest troubles came with Huawei, Xiaomi, One Plus and now even Samsung!

- What Android devices do you use, which one works most consistently and reliably?

I have answered this with my previous question.. I use Pixels and they are currently most reliable in terms of non-standard app killing. We see good results on Nokia - after they abandoned their EvenWell app killer which was the most horrible app killer ever made on Android :).. also Motorola is very well off but we see memory leak issues on some models. We did not see issues on HTC devices and till recently on LG.

- How much did you have to modify Android to make it work for you?

Not sure about this one. In general you have to adapt to Android changes to keep your apps working properly and for some app killing strategies there even is nothing the dev can do. Usually users need to navigate through horrible Setting pages to grant apps different exceptions from app killing and this is why we did the https://dontkillmyapp.com/ website. To help devs in case there are some workaround, and to help users find the very well berried settings.

- Is there a similar problem with iOS, are there any plans to release DontKillMyApp for iPhone?

No. iOS already came with so many restrictions that most of my apps would not even be possible iOS. The good thing about this is they are not introducing so many new restrictions every year like we see it on Android. On Android every year devs live in fear their app will stop working because Google restricts some APIs.

iOS is not fragmented in the way Android is. The big part of the problem is every OEM introduces their own app killing mechanism which are completely not transparent to users and devs and their configuration significantly differs. This is why we need DKMA on Android. But of course this is not the case for iOS.

- Top apps you use all the time as a regular user or / and developer.

I use my apps all the time as primarily I develop them for myself: Sleep as Android, Twilight, Digital Detox, SayIt, Baby Sleep, KineStop etc... :) from other devs I use EraRead for e-books, Palabre for news and I use Google apps e..g Keep, Tasks, Calendar, Gmail...

- Where did you start your development journey, what devices did it all start with?

It all started with an ancient tiny HTC phone with Android 1.6 on it :) in 2010.