Doze Mode/App Standby During Audio Playback

Question

I have noticed an issue with my audio streaming app on Android 6.0 devices. Audio streaming is done via HLS over a network connection. Audio playback occurs in a foreground service with an active notification. What I've noticed is that when the app enters doze mode/app standby, the wifi connection is lost and playback pauses. My service is in the foreground and has an active notification which, according to the docs, should qualify my app to not be interrupted. I also acquire and maintain a Wifi Lock. I've read about whitelisting my app, however apps like Spotify don't request any special permissions to avoid this issue. Any thoughts or suggestions?

Answer 1

The recommended solution is to have separate processes, one for audio playback and for the UI. See this long thread for lots of details

Here's the relevant section from Ms Hackborn:

... have your foreground service run in a different process than the activity. From what I can see, this will work fine. I would be interesting in seeing if you get the desired behavior there.

Also this is actually our recommended practice for this situation -- if you have a long-running foreground service, it should be in a separate process from the activity, so it doesn't force all of the memory associated with the activity to be kept around. (This is also why this bug got through, all of our [Google] apps use this pattern.)