Manufacturers, please keep interfering with notifications.<p>Better yet, let's get google in on the business and do it by default in a standardized fashion on every android device. Spam is bad enough sitting idly in my message center. I don't want my phone to fill up with battery-guzzling nagware unless I very explicitly enable it. An acceptable compromise would be to enable notifications by default but put a permanent disable option on each and every message so that users could punish apps on the first abuse.
So it seems like most Android manufacturers are independently adding their own aggressive power savings mode which kills apps - and prevents any background tasks or notifications - just about as soon as they're out of the foreground. And users have no idea this is the case when they buy the phone.<p>Seems like Google should just create a better power management system - or one that selectively lets through notifications without firing up the whole app - rather than have the manufacturers bungle this up.
Background beacon services or location services also suffer from this although I'm not always sure whether it is the OS author or the manufacturer.<p>The trick here is that these manufacturers know that people will try a different phone if they believe that one brand or another's battery won't last very long. (Ironically they probably all buy batteries from Samsung)<p>It drives me mad since our company provides software and hardware that does beacon and geofencing related tasks but the flip side is that I also know that when my Samsung battery is half that of my Wife's phone even though its 2 years newer, I'm definitely starting to think to myself 'maybe I should switch to an iPhone'. I think the real issue here is probably people wanting to do more than batteries really permit at the moment and its a frustrating tug of war.<p>The obvious answer in my mind is to give users the power to choose what they want. Its fine for manufacturers to choose defaults that will work for non power users.
Funny. The first thing I do (if it's an option) is disable notifications. I don't like my phone constantly interrupting me. I check for messages and email at my convenience, not the phone's.
I just got a Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 a while back, a lot of phone for not a lot of money. Anyway, it comes with MIUI, a stupid version of Android, and notifications was very rare with the default settings. You have to enable notifications per app, and then there was some sort of aggressive killing of background apps, so you wouldn't get any notification from many apps anyway since they weren't alive to send them.
All of these battery saving options are great, when they are painless. Running apps that _need_ to stay in the background like Tasker is a much more painful experience now than it was a few years ago.
> It's now only a matter of time before app-to-user SMS goes away entirely.<p>Was this ever a thing? The only SMS messages from "apps" I ever get are for 2FA codes.<p>Maybe it's regional? I know sending SMS to US numbers is a lot cheaper than, for example, Dutch numbers.