Android 13 may let users disable Google’s background process watchdog

Android 12 is still hot from the software oven but we’re already starting to get leaks and rumors about its successor. The internal name that Google uses for the Android 13 operating system has been revealed back in July, and now we have another hint at one key feature in Google’s next sugary-named OS version.

According to XDA Developers, Google may add a toggle switch in Android 13 Tiramisu to let users turn off a feature called Phantom Process Killer. To understand what exactly this means, we have to rewind the virtual tape a little.

Google introduced a big focus on Privacy with Android 12 and the new Privacy Dashboard. One of the background functionalities baked inside the OS was the aforementioned Phantom Process Killer - an aggressive watchdog that kills background processes if they happen to hang or use excessive CPU.

This functionality allows up to 32 forked child processes in total to run in the background, thus limiting the number of things an app can do while in the background. Now Mishaal Rahman (former Editor-in-Chief at XDA Developers) has spotted Google submitting a patch to the Android Open Source Project that lets developers turn off this feature.

The description for the patch reads:
Add settings to toggle the phantom process monitoring in dev options
For power users, the monitoring on phantom processes could be turned
off from the Settings->Developer Options->Feature flags.
 

An update on the phantom process issue: Google has just submitted a patch that adds a toggle in Developer Options to disable the monitoring of phantom processes!https://t.co/Nfn2npZMkX

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We probably won't see this until Android 13, though.

CC @agnosticapollohttps://t.co/iPP4fO6GAE

— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) December 14, 2021

 Rahman thinks that the option to toggle the Phantom Process Killer on and off will be taken out of the hidden Developer Options menu and added in a future Android release, possibly in Android 13.