Keeping Background Apps Alive

[ian1035nr]

Howdy, everyone

My Cosmo Communicator has been giving me some trouble (well, lots of trouble. Honestly I regret shelling out for it considering all the bugs and quirks).

But today I want to focus on its particular penchant for purging programs from RAM.

After running for about 7 days, the phone will start closing apps the second they are no longer in the foreground. Doesn’t matter what it is, or what I switch to. If that app isn’t in focus, it gets closed down.

I’m not anywhere close to out of RAM; available memory hovers between 3-2.5 gigabytes when this starts happening.

The only solution is to reboot, at which point it’s fine again.

I don’t want to compare Apples to Androids. But coming off my iPhone XR, which is running a newer, heavier OS on half the memory, this just seems kind of ridiculous. Even my BlackBerry Key2 doesn’t struggle with multitasking like this; and it’s running a similar tier of SoC of a similar vintage to what’s in the Cosmo.

Duraspeed is off.

I’ve disabled battery optimizations for anything that I want to keep running.

I even used systemize on some apps because I read somewhere that system apps are prioritized when Android chooses what to keep running in memory and what to suspend.

All of this is running on a rooted version of the v25 firmware.

No matter what I try, it doesn’t make a difference; it still chooses to act up.

If anyone has some advice, I’ll try just about anything.

[Daniel W]

Hi and welcome to OESF (and the somewhat wonky environment of the Cosmo).

While this, on it's own, likely isn't the answer you're looking for, I don't have that particular problem with my Cosmo, which suggests it should be avoidable on your device too.

I rarely reboot, lest I have to (my keyboard has a tendency to stop working a few times per month) so uptime well over a week isn't unusual for me. If what you describe was a general Cosmo or Android problem, I should reasonably have run into it too.

I have left DuraSpeed on, and switched on the toggles for the apps I need to keep running in the background. For me, that's things like Skype, Spotify, an app showing the date in the status bar (why Android can't do that is beyond me). I have also left the "Intelligent power saving standby" and the battery manager on, mostly since they haven't caused me noticeable issues thus far. According to developer options my average RAM usage hovers around 40%. My Cosmo runs Android only and isn't rooted.

In other words, I've done nothing in particular, and I don't have this issue. By itself, that might be less than useful to you. However, if more users chimes in with their settings and experiences, perhaps we can, together, find some kind of pattern to this. So, is anybody else experiencing this or not, and what are your settings?