I write a safety-critical Android app that watches a phone 24/7 — motion, GPS, screen activity — and emails the family if an elderly person's behavior suddenly looks wrong. Install it on grandma's phone and forget about it. That's the ideas. I've written here before about a SAM lambda that hung my geocoder for 21 hours, and about the OTAs that silently strip every battery-optimisation exemption I worked to get. This one is sillier than either. This one is about the time my own service-recovery layers were so visibly enthusiastic that the manufacturer's battery manager looked at them and went, "yeah, that's a zombie, kill it harder." The fix shipped last week. The bug is not really a bug - it's a category of mistake - and I think it's worth writing about because every Android dev I know who builds anything that has to run in the background eventually steps in this exact pile. The setup that should have worked Fresh install on an Honor phone running MagicOS 9.0 on top of Android 15.…