OnePlus Will Stop Aggressively Killing Apps In The Background

When OnePlus began its claim to Never Settle, it included a more vanilla Android experience in its promise. Over the years, it built its own identity with the Oxygen OS, mixing a near-vanilla Android with its own custom features. Unfortunately, one of those features involves a rather aggressive memory and battery management system that the company is now promising it would be easing up on in the near but unspecified future.

OnePlus is actually one of the top manufacturers accused of aggressively killing apps running in the background. In fact' it ranks third after Huawei and Samsung, a ranking it probably doesn't want to be part of. The reason for this "app killers" has always been to keep phones running smoothly and longer by decreasing battery use. Unfortunately, the consequence of too aggressive management is that apps may be killed too early, inconveniencing users and actually incurring more processing overhead by restarting the apps all over again.

OnePlus is now committed to fix that situation in future updates. That's one of the promises that the company made at its second ever Open Ears Forum held in India. This would follow HMD Global's similar promise to drop the third-party tool it uses for app and battery management in Nokia phones. Part of its reason is that Android 10 now has the facilities for smarter app management and there is no need for extraneous utilities.

That may be easier for HMD to pull off considering it will be updating nearly all its phones to Android 10 eventually. The same perhaps can't be said of OnePlus and it might end up simply tuning its own system which some owners might still find unsatisfying. It hasn't committed to when it will start rolling out these changes.

Although it can be commended for trying, OnePlus isn't exactly the fastest in updating its phones and, sometimes, end-of-life schedule do catch up with phones. IN those cases, OnePlus is also committing to promoting third-party ROMs that could extend the life of its devices beyond official support periods.