Modern Android smartphones, particularly those manufactured by Samsung and Xiaomi, employ highly aggressive battery optimization algorithms. If you open an app, use it for a few minutes, and then switch to another app, the operating system will often automatically kill the first app in the background to free up RAM and preserve battery life.
If that background app was a GPS fitness tracker, a music player, or a secure VPN client, having the operating system silently murder the process will instantly stop your workout tracking, halt your music, or expose your IP address.
To ensure critical applications continue running indefinitely in the background, you must manually exempt them from Android’s battery optimization rules.
How to Disable Battery Optimization for Specific Apps
You cannot disable this feature globally; you must grant unrestricted battery access on a per-app basis.
- Open the main Settings app on your Android phone.
- Scroll down and tap on Apps (or “Apps & notifications”).
- Find and tap on the specific app that keeps closing (e.g., Spotify, Strava). You may need to tap “See all apps” to find it.
- On the App Info page, tap on Battery.
- You will typically see three options:
- Unrestricted
- Optimized (Default)
- Restricted
- Select Unrestricted.
By selecting Unrestricted, you are explicitly commanding the Android operating system to never suspend, sleep, or kill that application’s background processes, regardless of how much battery it is consuming.