How To Fix Push Notifications On Oppo Phones
Ben Sin
Oppo, Vivo, Huawei, Xiaomi, it doesn't matter, all these phones will kill your push notifications.
So you've purchased an Oppo device. You like the build quality, and all the gimmicks the camera(s) can do, but you're realizing that you no longer receive notifications for Whatsapp, or Wechat, or Facebook? Welcome to the world of Chinese Android phones, in which their desire to offer you long-lasting battery life comes at the expense of sending you push notifications. The culprit is the aggressive battery optimization feature that kills background apps (to stop them from draining battery) completely. You see, on most phones, like the LG G6 or say Sony Xperia XZ Premium, you never really truly kill apps. Even when you "clear" them from the background, they still lurk in the background, so they can push notifications to your phone as soon as they become available. On Chinese phones, there is no mercy. The apps get the ax if they're not actively running. So if you get, say, a WhatsApp message, but the app has been killed, you won't get any notice of new messages until you open the app. Needless to say, this is a huge problem for people who may need to receive messages or emails in a timely manner.
There is, fortunately, a way to work around that pesky battery manager. Just follow the four steps and you'll soon be getting messages as they hit the interwebs.
Step 1: Go to settings --> advanced settings --> battery manager --> protected apps, then find the app you don't want killed, and "protect" it. This is essentially "whitelisting" the app, aka telling Oppo, "hey, this app is my friend, please don't kill it."
But that's not enough. Oppo's software will still kill the app unless you take two more steps.
Step 2: Go to settings --> apps --> advanced --> ignore battery optimizations, then find the app and ignore it. Don't be tricked by the misleading wording, "ignoring" the app actually means to let it run, because you're telling the battery optimization function, aka Doze, to "ignore" that app.
Step 3: Go to settings --> notification panel & status bar --> notification center, then find the app, then activate "allow notifications" and also "priority display". You have to activate the priority part too to make sure you get notifications. I've tried just activating allow notifications but not priority and I still didn't get notifications from that app.
Step 4: This is going to sound absurd to you if you've never used a Chinese phone ... but you basically have to lock the app in the "recent apps overview" panel, so that it is essentially always running in the background (don't worry, modern smartphones have enough RAM to be able to keep a couple of apps running at all times without bogging down). To do this, open the app from which you want to receive notifications, hit the square (aka 'app overview") button on the navigation bar, then pull down on that app to lock it into place. From here on out, even if you're "clearing all apps," the one you've locked will remain.
You have to complete all four steps to ensure you get full notifications from that app. Yes, it's a big hassle, but that's the price we have to pay to go Chinese right now. And it's not just Oppo/Huawei/Xiaomi anymore, even Samsung's Galaxy S8 does this.
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