Since Android 6.0, Google has heavily relied on an aggressive power-saving feature known internally as “Doze Mode” (branded in the UI as Battery Optimization). Whenever your phone screen is off and the device is physically stationary, Android violently suspends all background applications, cutting off their network access and pausing their sync timers to preserve battery life. The OS only briefly wakes them up during infrequent “maintenance windows.”
While Doze is fantastic for extending standby battery life, it is a catastrophic feature for mission-critical background applications. If you rely on a third-party alarm clock app, a GPS fitness tracker, a dedicated VPN client, or an enterprise messaging app (like Slack or Teams), Android’s Battery Optimization will frequently silence their notifications or sever their connections while the screen is off. You will miss crucial messages and alarms simply because the OS deemed the app “unimportant.” To guarantee that a critical app runs continuously in the background and receives notifications instantly, you must completely disable Battery Optimization for that specific application.
Disabling Battery Optimization via App Info Settings
You can grant an individual application permanent, unrestricted access to the battery and network directly from its App Info page.
- Open the main Settings app on your Android smartphone.
- Scroll down the main menu and tap on Apps (or “Apps & notifications”).
- Tap on See all apps to view your complete list of installed applications.
- Scroll through the alphabetical list and tap on the specific app that is missing notifications or disconnecting in the background (e.g., Slack).
- On the “App info” page, scroll down and tap on Battery.
- You will see three radio buttons governing how the OS treats this app: “Unrestricted,” “Optimized” (the default), and “Restricted.”
- Select the radio button for Unrestricted.
The change takes effect immediately. Android’s Doze Mode will no longer govern this specific application. It will be permitted to run CPU cycles, maintain active network connections, and push notifications to your screen instantaneously, regardless of how long your phone has been sitting idle on your desk.