Google released the second Android 13 developer preview late last week, containing many new improvements, such as new media controls, a new clipboard pop-up window, Android 13 for PC UI changes. According to Esper’s latest findings, Android 13 DP2 includes a new foreground service (FGS) task manager.
It displays a list of apps currently running foreground services and allows users to stop foreground services, supporting any target SDK version. Users can access a list called Active Apps by swiping down in the notification drawer and tapping the new icon next to the Settings gear.
As can be seen from the figure, the new icon shows the number of apps running the service in the foreground. After clicking, a card will pop up, showing the name of the app, the accumulated time of the activity in the foreground, and the stop button. The user can click the stop button to stop the App front desk service.
This is the third way to close the app on the Android system, which is different from the background slide to close the app and the “force stop” app option.
As can be seen from the official parameter table, the stop level of the FGS task manager is between “slide to close” and “forced close”, which will clear memory usage, close audio services, and remove related notifications, but will not affect the active back stack, etc.
Esper further pointed out that when the app’s foreground service is running for at least 20 hours in a 24-hour period, the FGS task manager will push a notification to remind the user to close. But if the foreground service is of type FOREGROUND_SERVICE_TYPE_MEDIA_PLAYBACK or FOREGROUND_SERVICE_TYPE_LOCATION, this notification will not appear.