Permanent services on android oreo

Question

Android 8\'s battery consumption improvements are nice to the user but I am a bit afraid if my service will work as expected.

First of all: Thank you for any suggest

Answer 1

For what is worth, I am sharing me experience on that:

It's partially possible to use a background service and not showing a foreground notification on Android 8.0 just made some experiments and ended up with this:

Just create a notification channel with IMPORTANCE_NONE, and the notification will still exist, but will not be displayed in status bar.

Code excerpt:

NotificationChannel channelService = new NotificationChannel(
    YOUR_SERVICE_CHANNEL_ID,
    YOUR_CHANNEL_HUMAN_READABLE_NAME,
    NotificationManager.IMPORTANCE_NONE);

channelService.setSound(null, null); // let's be quiet : no sound
channelService.setLockscreenVisibility(Notification.VISIBILITY_SECRET); // not on lock screen

// Register the channel with the system; you can't change the importance
// or other notification behaviors after this
// changes needs to uninstall app or clean app data, or rename channel id!
notificationManager.createNotificationChannel(channelService));

This way, the notification will not be displayed when your app is running in foreground.

Not a perfect solution:

When your app goes in background (i.e., you open another app), the "Android system" app displays a notification about "(your) app being running in the background". So, this is not great, but, from my point of view, it's a bit better than before.