The battle for battery life isn’t a very complex one. You either leave your GPS, Bluetooth and WiFi on all the time, with background apps ticking along, or you start cleverly shutting stuff down to conserve battery life.
A lot of manufacturers have added on board systems to “manage” apps, and nearly every phone will try and sip at that battery rather than guzzling it down in a few hours. Most phones, however, will conform to your requests to “whitelist” a certain app so that there’s no battery management. The trouble is, as we’ve covered before, no matter what you “whitelist” or “ignore” on Huawei and Honor handsets, the phones will ignore you and shutdown background apps when they see fit. It really doesn’t matter what you do, the phone has the power to kill the app.
We’ve seen this saga with GPS fitness apps like Strava, which continually shutdown on runs and rides. There is no fix, there’s nothing you can do. At some point in your impressive fast ride, it’ll shutdown Strava and kill the recording.
Strava have told us that the Huawei / Honor kit is “greylisted”, and they can’t guarantee that the app will function. Meanwhile, VLC seems to have the same problem, but they’ve gone one step further, pulling the app from Google Play for Huawei phones. They really don’t pull any punches either, calling it a “ridiculous policy of killing all background apps (except their own)”…
PSA: @HuaweiMobile phones are now blacklisted and cannot get VLC on the Play Store.
Their ridiculous policy of killing all background apps (except their own) breaks VLC audio background playback (of course).
See https://t.co/QzDW7KbV4I and many other reports…@HuaweiFr— VideoLAN (@videolan) 25 July 2018
We’ve previously got in touch with Huawei about these issues, and they’ve previously said that they’re working on them, but each new handset has the same problem. If we hear any updates, we’ll let you know.