It's a long and technical explanation so brace yourself - but the tl;dr of it all is:
Trickle will sadly be unable to function reliably enough on Android 14 and beyond. As such, I do not feel comfortable continuing to publish it as I do not believe it upholds the high standard of performance and reliability that I have set for myself. As of today Trickle is unpublished from the Play Store and is no longer maintained or supported. Sorry!
Android 14 changes various bits and pieces of how the system works - but the war on "background work" continues. Google has this time around changed things so that
Android 14 changes various bits and pieces of how the system works - but the war on "background work" continues. Google has this time around changed things so that
1. Any process that runs in the background that expects a "reliable" level of regular activity needs to declare itself a Foreground Service.
2. Declaration of an FGS requires you to fill out a Google Play Store policy document for your service (this was, for example, done for TetherFi, which was able to get approval because it fit into a pre-defined Google category for "allowed Foreground Services", but Trickle does not).
The two problems with this were that - Trickle would never be approved for FGS policy, and running the service as a foreground priority would actually end up using more battery than the service saved - so from day 1, using Trickle as a long-running foreground service was a "no-go" solution.
Back in July, some changes were made to how the Trickle service was used that allowed it to run reliably in the background without needing to declare itself a Foreground Service. At the time, I thought this would be a long term solution, and that would be the end of the worries about future version compatibility.
In October, Android 14 released and with it came one important implementation change regarding cached processes. To avoid a long technical talk, on Android 14+, when your app is NOT a foreground service, and your UI is not open, the operating system "suspends" your app and all of its services until you re-open the UI again. This "suspend" window is generally unfixed, but can be anywhere between 30 seconds and 10 minutes. Basically, after 30 seconds of not being an open UI on screen, Trickle would stop receiving the system screen-off and screen-on events, and would therefore not be reliable any longer. Any potential solutions to this problem would generally use more battery than they saved, and thusly, it is infeasible to continue Trickle development further given that the future direction of Android seems to only be continuing to lock itself down regarding these "background service" style applications.
A sad day, but a day I had known would come eventually, and it seems like despite my initial excitement for it back in July, the reality of the October release brought back my original fear.
Trickle is sadly gone, and probably for good this time. Unless the big G decides to publish an API specifically for apps like these, there are no reasonable alternatives. A sad day.
TetherFi continues to be fully supported and the next release (40) will even include some performance improvements and hopefully improve compatibility with various devices, particularly those running on Android 14.
Stay tuned!
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