Google and Samsung are partnering to improve how Android handles background processes across devices.

Android offers developers and device partners significant freedom to customize the user experience and how Android itself functions. Unfortunately, that freedom sometimes means ignoring Google’s direction on how Android should handle background processes. As a result, application performance and stability are often casualties.

To solve the issue, Google is working with hardware manufacturers to provide a more consistent experience:

Looking to solve these consistency challenges, we are announcing deeper partnerships with Android hardware manufacturers to help ensure APIs for background work are supported predictably and consistently across the ecosystem. We are excited to announce that Samsung, representing one of Android’s longest partnerships, is our first partner on this journey:

“To strengthen the Android platform, our collaboration with Google has resulted in a unified policy that we expect will create a more consistent and reliable user experience for Galaxy users. Since One UI 6.0, foreground services of apps targeting Android 14 will be guaranteed to work as intended so long as they are developed according to Android’s new foreground service API policy.” – Samsung

Google is bringing several planned improvements to Android 14 Developer Preview 1:

• A new requirement to declare foreground service types and request type-specific permissions, which clarify when it’s reasonable to use foreground services.
• The new user-initiated data transfer job type, which makes the experience of managing large user-initiated uploads and downloads smoother by leveraging JobScheduler’s constraints (e.g. network constraints such as unmetered WiFi).
• New Google Play policies to ensure appropriate use of foreground services and the user-initiated data transfer jobs.

Hopefully, Google will successfully bring other hardware partners on board with its new initiative, leading to a more consistent experience on Android.