Modern Android smartphones are heavily optimized to maximize battery life. To achieve this, the operating system aggressively monitors background applications. If you minimize an app—such as a GPS tracker mapping your hike, or a podcast player downloading episodes—and do not actively look at it for a few hours, Android will silently and automatically kill the app’s background processes.
While this preserves battery, it often breaks critical functionality. Fitness trackers stop recording your steps, alarm clocks fail to ring, and messaging apps stop checking for new notifications because the OS completely choked off their CPU access.
You can force Android to completely ignore battery constraints for specific, mission-critical applications.
How to Stop Android from Killing Your Apps
You must change this setting on a per-app basis within the battery optimization menu.
- Open the Settings app on your Android device.
- Tap on Apps (or “Apps & notifications”).
- Tap on See all apps to view your full application list.
- Scroll down and select the specific app that keeps crashing or stopping in the background (e.g., Strava or Spotify).
- On the App Info page, scroll down and tap on Battery.
- You will see three options: Unrestricted, Optimized (the default), and Restricted.
- Change the selection to Unrestricted.
By marking the app as Unrestricted, you are giving it permission to run continuously in the background. The Android OS will no longer attempt to force-close the app to save power, ensuring your GPS tracking or background downloads continue uninterrupted until you manually close the app.