Need to look up whether there’s a way in Android to keep a rarely-used app on pause as its default, so I can keep it installed and up to date for when I need it, but not worry about it doing anything behind my back or sending me notifications I don’t want.
This would be ideal for things like ride-hailing apps, where every once in a while I need it to track my location and send me a zillion notifications, preferably without downloading and installing a fresh copy, but the rest of the time I don’t want it running at all.
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I know how to pause an app for the rest of the day, but it turns right back on in the morning. And I know the system will remove permissions from apps that haven’t been used in months (for some definition of “used,” anyway), but that’s an extra 3 months of the app still doing whatever it’s built to do in the background
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Sigh…99% of search results are about disabling preinstalled apps.
But this app looks like the kind of thing I’m looking for:
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/superfreeze.tool.android/
I’d forgotten about the old task-killer/battery-management category. As several articles pointed out when I followed up on superfreeze, most of the use cases for them have been resolved over the years as batteries and Android’s background-process management have gotten better.
But this use case isn’t one that’s been resolved by the OS, and as long as the app doesn’t interfere with the built-in power management, it might do the trick.