Android Pie – Overnight Service Killed Consistently – Artificial Intelligence

I have an app which runs a background service overnight. It’s triggered to run by an alarm clock app.

The app spends the night uploading data off the phone’s external SD card onto Dropbox. It worked seamlessly on previous versions of Android but is not working on Pie. The background service is killed after running for about two hours every night. Interestingly, however, I’ve noticed that if I make a tiny change to my code, e.g. editing a string, and then run a debug, the app runs perfectly the next night but then on subsequent nights, goes back to being killed after two hours.

I’ve tried the following:

• Using a foreground service with a persistent notification
• Opening and closing an Activity after the app is opened so it’s in the recent apps list
• Making the app a device administrator
• Disabling battery optimisations for the app
• CPU and Wifi wakelocks
• Running a thread with an infinite loop that uses root privileges to adjust the app’s minfree values every five seconds
• Disabling Pie’s adaptive battery manager feature during the night

Despite all of these mechanisms, the app still gets killed. My theory is that there’s some kind of artificial intelligent battery manager/performance optimiser on the phone that picks up that the app runs all night and decides to kill it in the future but then gets reset when I re-install the app.

I’ve tried everything and I still can’t seem to find a solution. Can someone please point me in the right direction? I’m sure there’s some root/reflection thing that I can do to fix this but I just don’t know what it is!