Here is an explanation posted earlier by Cobalt about Android apps supposedly running in the background:
Oh I love this question about Android apps eating up battery in the background. What I'm telling you now is backed up by the Blackberry Developer Site and is valid for ANY Android app on your device:
From the Blackberry developer docs about the Blackberry Android runtime (Jelly Bean):
* Apps can run services only while the user runs them, either in full screen or in thumbnail mode.
*
https://developer.blackberry.com/and..._software.html
What does that mean? The Blackberry Android runtime does NOT allow Android apps to run any services in the background. Period. As soon as the screen goes off (battery saving mode, sleep mode), ANY Android app will stop working in the background. A good example to explain this may be light in your fridge. Everytime you open the door of your fridge, the light is on, right? So we must assume, that the light in the fridge is permanently on? No, it's not. It's triggered when you open the door and it goes off when you close the door.
The only way to get an Android app to run permanently in the background is to implement Blackberry Headless mode. This must be requested from blackberry, and usually those apps are then ONLY avaliable on Blackberry World as a ported Android app (an example is Skype). All other Android apps that you download from anywhere else do NOT incorporate Headless mode and CANNOT run in the background.
Now I already hear all the "specialists" that are saying "Hey, but I'm running task manager xyz and there are a lot of services running on my device and I cleaned them and now everything is great"
Well, that simply isn't true. Running a task manager app is just like opening the door on the fridge. The light is now on. But if you close the taskmanager and the device goes to sleep, all services are stopped again.
The second thing that you should know about background services is, that against the common believe, they do not RUN in the background. They register a trigger in the Android runtime. The registering service itself is not running. Now if the Android runtime receives an Intent, it will look if a services was registered for the intent and THEN will start the service. The service will do its work (i.e. sync data) and then close again. On a Blackberry device, this will only happen if:
a) The device is NOT in sleepmode
b) The app is open OR running in an active Frame
If those conditions are not met, nothing happens. No services is started.
I downloaded GC http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/78977. It shows the permissions of the app but unless I'm doing something wrong I can't change the permissions, in fact it's exactly the same as cobalt's mobile network apk. All I can do is click the permission and it gives me a brief explanation. I already know how to force close it but I'm more interested it making sure it never opens on its own again.
06-02-16 03:06 AM
