[Android General] lambgx02:
I wanted to start this thread to discuss Doze and its impact on reliability, primarily on safety applications.

I'd like to start with a general statement: the days of our devices being merely telephones are long behind us. We still call them cell phones, but as we - especially here - know, our devices are so much more. They truly are wearable computers. They're our music, our cameras, our navigators, our communicators, our personal databases.. and for some of us, safety equipment. And they must be reliable.

Now, battery life is important. No question about that. But.. and I'm trying to put this delicately.. Doze was forced upon us with no option to globally disable, and even "whitelisting" applications doesn't fully release them from the confines of the new battery management policy. For some of us, Doze has made our devices less reliable.

The application category I'd like to call attention to first is marine anchor alarms. For those who don't boat, anchor alarms monitor a vessel's position with the GPS. If the anchor drags a certain distance (and the boat moves more than it should), an alarm is issued to alert the crew to the danger. It is entirely possible to drift (particularly when anchored in current) without triggering the significant motion sensors, limiting even whitelisted apps to 15-minute GPS polls. A lot can happen in 15 minutes.

Obviously using a portable device as your sole means of anchor drag detection is not a wise idea. Yet, many people with smaller boats do it, because that's all they have. Some of us with larger vessels do it as well, with a secondary system as a backup (since anchor alert applications make it much easier to define the anchor scope and exclusion zones precisely). This is all very much beside the point.

This category of application can no longer function reliably on Android! As of Android 6.0, anchor alerts can no longer monitor the GPS position reliably 24 hours per day unless:

1. The device is plugged in (and the power supply hasn't failed), or,

2. The application uses media input/output (a battery-wasting hack).

Unlikely as it may be, it is possible that someone will lose their small vessel this summer because their device failed to notify them that they'd slipped off the anchor, even if they knew enough to whitelist the app!

This is a pretty serious regression, and there are others. AIS (Automatic Identification System) and radar warning apps that communicate directly with ship systems via IP are no longer reliable. Tasker can no longer respond to local events with a granularity better than 15 minutes. Sleep monitoring applications are broken as well. And this is after you've manually whitelisted these applications!

I don't want this thread to sound like a rant. Doze is a fantastic addition to Android. But I would like to get the conversation started so that more people recognize that it imposes a fairly significant cost for some people.. especially those of us with extended batteries who feel virtually no benefit.

I was hoping people could respond with:

1. Other categories of applications, or individual applications that are no longer reliable on Android 6+ (particularly those related to safety),

2. A "me too" if you want the ability in custom or official roms to a) completely/situationally disable Doze without root, or b) properly whitelist applications, and,

3. Whether or not you've personally experienced critical notification delays, missed alarms, or other negative effects you attribute to Doze.

If anyone does need to disable Doze in the meantime, there is a straightforward (not well documented) way to do it if you are rooted:

dumpsys deviceidle disable

The change is non-persistent.