There is a hidden limit to background apps introduced with Android 12 and no way to get past it – that’s probably why we’ll have to wait for Android 13. This is one of the most profound changes to background app management that Google has introduced in recent years, but only power users – users who take advantage of advanced features that usually don’t appeal to the general public – should have noticed the strange behavior.
Among the many innovations introduced by Android 12, there is one that for a long time remained hidden from the public eye: it is the introduction of an aggressive policy for the control of background apps called “Phantom Processes”.
The name, which in Italian we can translate as phantom processes, perfectly describes the behavior of these apps: the applications create instances of themselves, which in technical jargon are called forks. These forks are child-processes, as they descend directly from a parent app: there are various uses of this technique, which is used by practically all the apps on our smartphones.
Phantom processes are these forks created by apps that act in the background to complete certain operations. With Android 12, the PhantomProcessKiller mechanism was introduced: if the child processes of an app consume too many resources or too much CPU, they are automatically terminated. This is an aggressive background app management policy that currently, on Android 12, cannot be disabled by users in any way.
How Android 12 handles background apps
If the average user may never run into a problem related to the action of PhantomProcessKiller, many power users may find themselves in trouble. In the technical analysis of this new mechanism present on Android 12 carried out by XDA Developers, a rather common case related to the use of Termux is explained.
Termux is a terminal emulator for Android that allows you to install a Linux environment on smartphones, tablets and TV boxes with the Google operating system. By default, Termux only installs a minimal set of packages to accommodate the size of the Play Store installation.
But you can install – virtually – any Debian Advanced Package Tool (APT) package. Especially when using different software packages via Termux it is easy to run into the system limit imposed by Google, which limits the maximum capacity of background processes to 32 child processes – the famous forks mentioned above.
More control in the future, but we’ll have to wait for Android 13
However, it seems that Android 13 may be the answer to this inconvenience: Mishaal Rahman, an expert Android analyst, has identified a Google patch that adds a toggle in Developer Options to disable ghost process monitoring.
An update on the phantom process issue: Google has just submitted a patch that adds a toggle in Developer Options to disable the monitoring of phantom processes!https://t.co/Nfn2npZMkX
We probably won’t see this until Android 13, though.
CC @agnosticapollo https://t.co/iPP4fO6GAE
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) December 14, 2021
In the future, users will be able to disable this feature by going to Settings> Developer Options and disabling the toggle for monitoring ghost processes. The toggle could arrive with the next update to Android 13, whose code name is a tribute to the Italian confectionery tradition.
In the meantime, more than one company is having big problems updating their devices to Android 12: OnePlus stands out among all, which had to stop releasing the update due to the presence of bugs.