Whenever I go to my homescreen or otherwise load another app the previous one closes. If I’m browsing Lemmy and I open a page linked on a post to read it, my app will have reset itself when I close the tab and I either have to give up or root around for the post.
This OS is borderline unusable in this state. It even evicts my homescreen app so there’s a 5-10 second lag when tapping the circle button.
Any tips? I have 8GB of RAM, which should be more than enough for a dozen apps.
No, apps closing between switches is not a matter of battery, it’s a core feature of Android related to the management of RAM. Whenever the OS needs more available RAM, the OS will close a backgrounded app to make those resources available. This is why it happens more frequently on low-end devices - these generally ship with less RAM.
Some misguided vendors will limit background execution in incorrect ways in the name of saving battery, but the general thing with apps living in background is a story of RAM.
Interestingly enough, apps are supposed to be built to cope with being closed down due to lack of RAM and then be restored seamlessly, but this is an art that is uncommonly done correctly in the Android development space. The OS support is there, though.
Activity Lifecycle.
That’s right. The art of correctly handling
savedInstanceState
is unfortunately not exactly well understood