That’s a bummer to find out. We don’t want to have to schedule it as an alarm either, but using what should be the “correct” way to schedule something like this (setExactAndAllowWhileIde) was straight-up being ignored by a lot of phones overnight. People would schedule something for 4am, and it would run at 8am when they woke up. If it was just a few minutes late, I think we could handle that, but it basically wasn’t working at all.
Google Messages doesn’t do it, but it could be a situation where the default SMS app is excluded from battery optimizations, or it could be that they’re scheduling an FCM message to be delivered in the future to wake them up. Hard to say, with them being closed source. Or, you know, maybe it doesn’t work that well for Google Messages either – maybe you just have a well-behaved phone or you haven’t tested the “4am scenario”, hard to say.
Anyway, the other options we were considering were keeping a foreground service around if you have any scheduled messages (pretty egregious, especially if you schedule something to send in a few days), or have the service send us an FCM message later to wake us up (requires the server to do work for us, and also still not guaranteed to work, as we’ve seen plenty of devices ignore our FCM messages).
So here we are :) We probably won’t be changing this much in the immediate future, but I wanted to give you the background on how we got where we are.
Do you know if you have the “Don’t keep activities” setting on in developer options?
