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I'm quite confused about Samsung's "App Power Management" page. There seems to be several overlapping settings:

  1. Adaptive Battery - Limit battery for apps that you don't use often
  2. Put apps to sleep - put apps to sleep when they haven't been used for a while
  3. Sleeping Apps - These apps won't run in the background
  4. Deep Sleeping Apps - ...will never run in the background...
  5. Apps that won't be put to sleep

Here's my guess interpretation:

  • (1) & (2) sound like exactly the same setting. I'm assuming (1) is the stock Android 10 implementation whereas (2) is the custom Samsung version that possibly predates Android 10 and potentially more aggressive? Honestly I'm not sure why they're keeping both.

  • Same goes for (3) & (4). Both sound the same to me. It looks like again maybe (3) is the original OS setting and (4) is some Samsung thing.

  • I'm assuming (5) is an exclusion list for apps that won't be picked up by (1) & (2)

  • None of these settings are related to Doze mode and even putting an app under (5) doesn't disable dozing for that app.

Would love to get more details if you have them.

Edit: Galaxy 20

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This is an educated guess, based on my interests in battery related things.

  • Android Pie introduced five buckets, to classify apps, as a part of power management, in the sense app restrictions (and therefore battery usage) are based on the buckets they belong to. Exact implementation is left to OEMs (that's why I said "guess"). Briefly:

  • Active: App currently being used.

  • Working Set: An app is in the working set bucket if it runs often but it is not currently active. Example, social media apps

  • Frequent: used regularly, but not necessarily every day. For example, a workout-tracking app.

  • Rare: not often used. For example, a hotel app that the user only runs while they're staying at that hotel.

  • Never: installed but never run are assigned to the never bucket.

Apart from this, we have and battery optimization (found in battery settings). With this as background:

  1. Adaptive Battery This is an AI feature which learns from usage, in terms of when (at what time) is an app used, what is the frequency, and things like screen brightness etc. Aim is to use AI and the buckets together to optimize battery and user experience

put AI at the core of the operating system and focuses on intelligent and simple experiences.

For more see What is exactly "Adaptive battery", and what does it mean for app developers?

  1. Put apps to sleep: This is battery optimization and you can select apps to be included or excluded. This is also linked to doze. Let's say your screen off is set to 5 minutes and your browser is selected to be a part of this set of apps. After screen off, and a certain interval, doze kicks in and your browser background activities are paused.

  2. Apps that won't be put to sleep: If you exclude an app from battery optimization, it will function when screen is off and not be affected by doze. For example it may be your music player.

  3. Deep sleeping apps: This is advanced battery optimization found in some OEMs and is a pain point at times for users and developers. AFAIK, all OEMs don't have this. Don't kill my app.com gives examples of how badly this optimize and advanced optimization hurt for different OEMs.

  4. Apps that won't be put to sleep: may be system apps like alarm (you can't let that go to sleep) or user apps like VPN, alarm etc.

To reiterate, I don't have a Samsung device but I am fairly sure that the description above is correct in broad terms. Corrections by way of posting answers are welcome.

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  • But may I ask what is the exact difference between sleep and deep sleep?
    – ohnezahn
    Nov 11, 2020 at 20:58
  • @ohnezahn As I understand, when an app sleeps, it can still do some necessary tasks, say, an alarm clock, it can still ring alarm at the specified time (say 5 hours later) whereas in deep sleep it is killed, no alarm to ring. This is my understanding. App developers recommend users to go this site and fix such issues dontkillmyapp.com
    – beeshyams
    Nov 12, 2020 at 2:13
  • But what is the relation between Doze Mode and Deep Sleep ? I just did some tests on my Samsung (Android 11 + OneUI 3.1), and discovered that an app can not be excluded from Doze Mode and Deep Sleep at the same time. Why is that ? (see my question here : android.stackexchange.com/questions/243247/…)
    – ChennyStar
    Dec 13, 2021 at 4:36
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To properly answer this:

Sleeping apps - These apps won't run in the background. They may not receive updates or send notifications

This means they cannot be started in the background state. The user must open them before anything can happen.

Deep Sleeping apps - Deep sleeping apps will never run in the background. They'll only work when you open them

This means even if you open the app, and leave the app (home button) they will be shut down after a few minutes, or when screen shuts off. They also cannot be started in the background state.

Sleeping apps work like normal if you open them, deep sleeping apps only work when you are interacting with them.

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