Aliexpress restarts even after manually force closed

GangsterCrown

Hi. This may sound odd, but even after manually force closing Aliexpress, it relaunches in the background a few hours later. My guess is that is some "undocumented feature" of AliExpress itself. I was curious to know if someone else is having this issue as well, and how they do this (does it uses some sort of exploit, or something?).
The reason I know AliExpress restarted is because I activate all notifications in the app settings so that when it starts it sends a notification (to buy stuff or some "promotion") and thus I know i forgot to force close and now to know when it relaunched.
Note: Yes, I should't use AliExpress, but that is not the point of this post. My goal is to know who they do this, because this shouldn't happen (as far as i know), and may possibly need to be fixed to prevent others (possibly for worst reasons than to sell stuff) from doing this.

Fay_Wilmont

As far as I know, force closing an app does not guarantee that it will not start again without user intervention. There are system events that wake apps. I used to use an app that let you block those "wake paths" for a specific app.

r134a

I can't directly find the links where the GOS account explained this in detail, but it was a direct result of the recent attack on the project by a guy who's pull request got rejected by GOS by it being focussed on the legacy button navigation, and actually not doing what the guy thought it was doing (i interpreted that force close is security theatre and that apps can wake theirselves or let other apps wake themselves, something along those lines). I've picked up from that explanation aswell that disabling an app is the way to stop an app being able to wake itself (through other apps).

I've read over it quickly so the accuracy of what i say here might be (a little) off. Neverthelesss, perhaps u or someone else can find that explanation and link it here.

r134a

r134a I've found an in depth explanation back on a matrix room posted by the GOS account regarding this, and i hope it is ok that i take the liberty to copy it here:

Force stopping apps also only kills an app and prevents it starting itself via jobs, alarms, etc. It can still be started by other apps which completely removes the STOPPED state. Malware regularly sets up other apps starting them later via APIs to bypass force stopping. It doesn't work as either a privacy or security feature. Setting the Restricted battery mode is a persistent setting which prevents an app running in the background by itself and defers all jobs, alarms, etc. until the next time another app starts it including the user launching it via a launcher. Force stopping is not a persistent setting but rather temporarily puts an app into the STOPPED state until any other app starts it again which fully removes the restrictions. Restricted battery mode is what people want if they want to stop apps running in the background. Remembering to force stop an app every time you launch it doesn't make sense and wouldn't work for cases apps launch it automatically. Google Play services checks if an app is in the STOPPED state before delivering a push message for Firebase Cloud Messaging but most apps including UnifiedPush implementations will not do this. There are known ways of bypassing force stopping via common apps, so it doesn't work in the way that people expect it to. Since force stopping doesn't prevent an app from running, GrapheneOS adds the option of disabling user installed apps to the App info user interface. The recent apps activity and default launcher both provide shortcuts to App info instead of needing to open up Settings and navigate to it. Restricted battery mode is the way to persistently stop an app running in the background by itself or starting itself.