Android 14
Android 14: A More Efficient and User-Friendly Operating System
Google aims to offer enhanced user experience through its optimisation, owing to several power-saving enhancements, including better app caching and event scheduling. It appears that the business is also battling dishonest individuals who attempt to circumvent the new operating system’s restrictions on background apps.
Certain libraries, like MarsDaemon, allow apps to operate in the background endlessly, as Oasis Feng, a greenify app developer found (via Mishaal Rahman). In short this is accomplished by launching many processes that keep track of whether other processes from the same application are terminated in order to stop the app from operating in the background. Reopening as a new process, a process will notice that another has been killed. The system effectively prevents the application in issue from properly hibernating when it repeats this chain each time a process is terminated.
The vulnerability is fixed in Android 14, in order to prevent them from restarting slain processes in the background, this is accomplished by basically freezing the whole program and all of its processes first, followed by the system killing individual processes and only then resuming the surviving ones. Mishaal Rahman adds that while the library isn’t harmful in and of itself, malware frequently uses it to prolong its active state. Along with these changes, the firm has increased the maximum number of applications saved in the cache itself from 32 to 1024 and shortened the amount of time required to freeze cached apps from 10 minutes to 10 seconds with Android 14.
Google made several additional improvements to Android 14 in addition to blocking potentially harmful efforts to keep applications running continuously in the background. The corporation made modifications to Android’s internal broadcasting mechanism which notifies apps of changes in connection and battery life. It is also advised that developers refrain from using precise alarms in their apps unless they include a calendar or alarm app. Android phones batteries are particularly burdened by the feature that allows users to receive messages at a specific time. Actually, in order for freshly installed applications designed for Android 13 or higher to send alerts, they must ask the user for permission explicitly.
