Restarting killed (stopped by task-killers) services in android like Whatsapp

Question

I am working on a app locker which has some background services (to lock apps). I am using Xiaomi Redmi Note 4g for the development. The MIUI has an in-built task manager which can be used to kill running apps. When I kill apps with this, all services, broadcastreceivers and alarmmanagers are getting removed (as expected from a task manager). My requirement is to prevent my background services from getting cleared from task-killers, but if the user navigates to settings and force closes, the service should stop. How do I achieve this?

Btw, I know that its not impossible to achieve this since Whatsapp and Truedialer (some egs) are already doing this on the latest android versions.

My observations from Whatsapp:

• I kill the app from the task manager
• All services in Whatsapp are stopped except for "MessagingService"
• The list view of the running apps show status as "Restarting"
• "AlarmService" service starts up (not sure if MessagingService is starting it or from an AlarmManager)
• After a time lag, all services are up and running

Note: The timer on the MessagingService isn't reset and it still keeps on ticking. But if I force stop the service, its not started again until I manually fire the app.

Similar observations are made for TrueDialer.

I have tried to replicate this with START_STICKY, AlarmManager, BroadcastReceiver, but was unsuccessful. Can someone help me on this? I just want to understand how Whatsapp is achieving this. Feel free to ask if you need more info.

Answer 1

I've solved the problem.

Solution for MIUI 7.0 => Security => Autostart => select Apps that you want to run in background => Reboot After reboot your device should able to run your application services in background like other android devices do.

MIUI 4.0 settings

MIUI AutoStart Detailed Description