I feel like I’m encountering weird little tics and problems with my android devices, and those of family and friends. Just simple things where settings don’t seem to be consistently applied, or the os switches something back repeatedly. For example, my apps are set to auto update, to use data as well as WiFi, etc, but every month or so I go into Play and see that some random app hasn’t been updated in weeks.
Or my friend only gets Signal notifications when they open the app, despite giving full background data use, turning off adaptive battery, etc. My mother uses an alarm app that needs to display over the screen for a feature, but despite me setting that permission repeatedly Android keeps turning it off.
Is this just anecdotal bad luck? Or is all the work to preserve battery life, control background usage, etc led to an OS where the user can’t control things reliably? It starting to feel a lot like MS Windows!
Not updating consistently might be by design. Updates are often staggered between different geographical locations as well as different randomly selected groups, so that bugs can be caught early and updates avoided if an issue emerges in production.
Play specifically offers an A/B and graduated rollout mechanism, but you bypass this if you explicitly check for updates.
As for notification consistency, sadly this has been a problem for about a decade as Android tries to wrestle with background services.