Apps keep getting killed in the background

raxod502

DeletedUser370 I definitely never enabled "don't keep activities" but I agree it would cause catastrophic breakage like this if enabled. I followed your suggestion to enable and then disable that option, and then disable developer settings and reboot the phone. I still see the same behavior, which is that the webpage I have open in Firefox gets killed in less than a minute just through my switching to a couple of other apps before switching back.

I've never used profiles before, but I'm assuming that this refers to the "multiple users" setting in the system settings app. I logged in as a brand new guest with Firefox and a couple of other apps enabled to be installed. I opened Wikipedia in Firefox and went to edit an article, and typed some text in (so that I can tell, when coming back, if the app got killed, reloading the page and dropping anything I'd entered). I switched to a couple of other apps and then back to Firefox. The data was gone, showing the app was killed.

So, this is not related to anything I did outside of what would apply globally to every profile as well as guests.

DeletedUser370

raxod502 Interesting. So the problem is global.

Did you ever use adb to perhaps change any settings on the device? Is there an accessibility service enabled that might cause issues?

DeletedUser69

raxod502 to help you better troubleshoot your issue, can you send link to the source the app was downloaded from? Did you try reinstalling it, do the issues occur in the app after instal with no settings changed?

raxod502

DeletedUser370 I am not aware of changing any particular device settings directly through adb. I reviewed my computer shell history for adb commands and didn't see anything that looked relevant either. According to my Accessibility settings, there are no apps enabled with Accessibility permissions.

DeletedUser69 Firefox was just installed via Aurora Store. I don't think reinstalling Firefox is relevant here, as the problem occurs with all apps and not just Firefox. Plus, I did somewhat recently uninstall Firefox Beta and switch back to Firefox main release since they added support for addons outside of the beta channel, and the behavior has been the same both before and after doing that.

In typical operation I use Magisk, however I verified that this is unrelated to the issue I'm reporting, by flashing the latest stock GrapheneOS ROM and testing to see exactly the same behavior. I've seen some contentious discussions on this forum about the implications of device root access, and would prefer not to have another one here unless there is a specific technical reason why this would be directly relevant to the problem under discussion.

DeletedUser370

raxod502 In typical operation I use Magisk, however I verified that this is unrelated to the issue I'm reporting, by flashing the latest stock GrapheneOS ROM and testing to see exactly the same behavior.

In order to be able to perhaps assist you any further, I think it's necessary to have some more insight into exactly what you tested and how. So far we know that you flashed an OS and then tested it.

For example, I think the following could be a good starting point for a test:

Flash GrapheneOS using the official installer from grapheneos.org, boot the device and proceed through the setup wizard, connect to a network, install all app updates, then open all the preinstalled apps, use them for a while and see what happens. For instance, you mentioned earlier that Firefox was misbehaving. Does the same happen with Vanadium when the OS is in this state?

If that works completely fine, you may want to then start by setting up your device as you normally would, and pay attention to when exactly the misbehavior occurs. Are you able to retrace any configurations you set, apps you installed, and so on, prior to the misbehavior starting?

raxod502

DeletedUser370 I flash the stock ROM by sideloading into recovery. Here's a shell script that shows the exact steps: https://paste.sr.ht/~raxod502/942a7e8d6c4c6bca674e0d0d5269c2474e171ce4

The official installer can't be used for this purpose because it wipes all user data.

I normally keep Vanadium disabled to prevent it being used by accident, but to test, I temporarily re-enabled it and verified that I see exactly the same behavior with Vanadium as I do with Firefox.

I really don't want to wipe all my user data, as that will put my device into a bad state for several months until I can gradually build up the (to my knowledge impossible to back up) configurations for all the notification channels, etc. It shouldn't be necessary to do that in order to get any introspection on why the operating system decides to kill a process. I have to assume that this information is logged somewhere; if someone knows which utility or kernel component is responsible for app shutdown then I could look into the logs for that or the source code implementation.

other8026

raxod502 I flash the stock ROM by sideloading into recovery. Here's a shell script that shows the exact steps: https://paste.sr.ht/_raxod502/942a7e8d6c4c6bca674e0d0d5269c2474e171ce4

raxod502 The official installer can't be used for this purpose because it wipes all user data.

What you're doing is not supported. If you've been rooting or otherwise messing with the official releases, we cannot help you with this issue. It's not possible for us to guess all that you've done to your phone, and is therefore impossible for us to help you troubleshoot.

You should install the official release without modifications and following the official instructions.

UnglazedDonutTS37

DeletedUser370

No. In the past I have used ADB to kill bloatware but with GOS I haven't needed to.

raxod502

other8026 I have no reason to believe that having root access to my device is related to this problem. Given that flashing the stock ROM (which reverts any modifications that may have been made by Magisk) does not change the behavior, what technical reason do you have to assert that root access is the cause?

de0u

raxod502 Given that flashing the stock ROM (which reverts any modifications that may have been made by Magisk) does not change the behavior, what technical reason do you have to assert that root access is the cause?

Did somebody assert that?

I think what other8026 wrote was not "You are having this problem because of root access". I think what other8026 meant is that the volunteers on the forum are primarily working to support users of unmodified GrapheneOS releases.

In general, the reason people root devices is to make modifications, and once a device's installation has been modified in unknown ways it is much harder to support.

andrej567

just a note to the topic - Re: Apps keep getting killed - I noticed today that organic maps app (latest from google store) is not able to download new maps unless I keep the app open while downloading maps and I have touch the screen once a while to prevent autolock.

i am not blaming graphene os for that, probably the app has to be updated for android 15, no idea. we will see, its not urgent

raxod502

de0u The statement "If you've been rooting or otherwise messing with the official releases, we cannot help you with this issue" (especially the word cannot) implied to me that rooting was being blamed for this issue.

I'm really unsure of why rooting the device is considered different than any of the other hundreds of important modifications that can be made to it within the existing operating system. You don't know what apps people have installed, what permissions they've been granted, how all the system settings are configured, etc etc. (Although these are all things I would be more than happy to provide about my setup.)

Regarding the concern about how my device "has been modified in unknown ways" - the ways are certainly not unknown to me, and I'm happy to share exactly what modifications have been made. I simply use Magisk (or specifically this fork that adds GrapheneOS compatibility) to apply Trust User Certs, Block Ads, and (in the past but no longer) MagiskFrida and SafetyNet Fix.

I could believe that MagiskFrida could cause issues around process spawning (and indeed I've reported bugs around that to the module author), but I removed that module as a consequence. The other modules seem completely unrelated to app suspend/resume, and especially do not seem like they would be making persistent modifications to the system that would survive past the ROM being re-flashed.

de0u

raxod502 The statement "If you've been rooting or otherwise messing with the official releases, we cannot help you with this issue" (especially the word cannot) implied to me that rooting was being blamed for this issue.

Personally if somebody says "If A or B then C", I wouldn't transform that statement to "If A then C". What happened to the "or otherwise messing with the official releases" part of the statement?

raxod502 Regarding the concern about how my device "has been modified in unknown ways" - the ways are certainly not unknown to me [...]

You are 100% entitled to believe that the modifications you have made can't possibly be responsible for the unwanted result you are observing. And I think @other8026 is 100% entitled to restrict support efforts to devices running unmodified/unrooted GrapheneOS.

raxod502

de0u Please, I am not trying to start a fight. We don't need to litigate exactly what people should or should not have surmised from the language in specific comments.

All I'm here to do is to participate in a bug report. If the official response is that no bug reports from me are accepted, regardless of area, because of something unrelated that you don't like (i.e. that I've rooted my device), then that's the official response. I understand that as we do not have a commercial relationship this is perfectly within your right, any of my feelings aside.

If on the other hand it's claimed that the fact I've rooted my device is not unrelated, I would be overjoyed to know the reasoning for this, as it would help me troubleshoot or follow up with third-party developers.

de0u

raxod502 If the official response is that no bug reports from me are accepted, regardless of area, because of something unrelated that you don't like (i.e. that I've rooted my device), then that's the official response.

To be clear, no response from me is an official response.

Carlos-Anso

raxod502
If I understand correctly you have sideloaded an OS update and believe this resets everything that you may have changed with the various modules, while your device was rooted, back to default.

While this may be true there is also the possibility that some things were changed that are not reset by flashing an update.

As your problems appear somewhat unique theres a reasonable chance they stem from the somewhat unique modifications you have been making to your device.

Along with rooting, modifying settings in Developer options, making modifications via adb or disabling or denying permissions to system apps can all cause issues that may appear unrelated to those modifications. We strongly advise users to avoid doing these things.

Carlos-Anso

@raxod502 Another cause of your browsers loosing their state could be memory pressure. Particularly if you are on an older device with less RAM, have multiple profiles running, VPNs, apps which have persistent services running and/or wake regularly etc. Some apps are also particularly memory hungry.

Some of the hardening in GrapheneOS can cause apps to have higher memory use compared to other androids. Worth also considering that compared to your experiences on another OS.

If you have Dev options enabled can check in Running services

Ghoelian

The issue seems to have resolved itself the past few days. Spotify hasn't been paused unless I manually paused playback first, and it even goes on all night if I let it play a playlist on repeat.

Not sure what fixed it in the end, there have been several updates to Spotify and also 2 GrapheneOS updates I think.

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