DontKillMyApp: Make apps work

Petr Nálevka (Urbandroid)

About this app

The official DontKillMyApp app is here - make apps finally work properly even if you do not own a Pixel.

Helps you set up your phone background tasks so that your apps can finally work for YOU even when not looking at the screen right now.

See how is your phone doing and test different settings with DontKillMyApp benchmark.

Features:
• DKMA benchmark: Measure how aggressively is your phone killing background apps
• Guides: Get actionable steps to overcome most background process restrictions
• Make a change:️ Help smartphones stay smart by sharing your benchmark report to dontkillmyapp.com

DontKillMyApp is a benchmark tool to see how well does your phone support background processing. You can measure before setting up your phone, then go through the setup guides and benchmark again to see how much has your phone been slacking in the background.

You can share your report through the app to the maintainers of the dontkillmyapp.com website who compile it and base the overall negative score on it.

How does the benchmark work? (Technical!)

The app starts a foreground service with a wake lock and schedules repetitive task on the main thread, a custom thread executor and schedules regular alarms (AlarmManager.setExactAndAllowWhileIdle). Then it calculates executed vs. expected. That's it!

For more details check the code. The app is open source available at https://github.com/urbandroid-team/dontkillmy-app

This app is open source and this project is maintained by volunteers who care about the Android ecosystem, feel the current pain and want to make it better.

Special thanks to Doki (github.com/doubledotlabs/doki).

Ratings and reviews

My Pixel 6 started showing severe battery drain in the past few weeks, I have tried many of the hibernation apps and even force stop apps, something did not seem right using those apps. I have run the benchmark test 3 times in the past week. The blue alarm has moved from being at the 4th column to the second column from the left, showing a 100% for all 3 parameters each time. Will keep monitoring.

Very, very good concept and I wish there were more apps like it. I have an LG Stylo 6 and it closes every app as soon as I go to the home menu, turn off the phone, or even when I go to the recent apps menu. This phone does it no matter what (I've changed every setting to help). The exact reason I downloaded this was that I got tired of having to reload Pokemon Go every time I try to use another app. DontKillMyApp keeps it open (for a minute or so) about 50% of the time that I close Pokemon Go.

Excellent app to identify problems which may affect battery performance. My first bemchmark of 3 hours showed an 18% decrease caused by an alarm setting. Since I don't use alarms, this was surprising. It was easily fixed with a toggle switch swipe. I've turned on my battery saver and those 2 changes have improved the way my (out of warranty, no longer supported) LG phone behaves. A nice addition to my life.

What's new

Android 16 target SDK, Material Expressive 3 redesign, exact alarm scheduling permission handling, better running benchmark handling