Why aren’t my Android Push Notifications being received and audio not playing in the background when some phones go to sleep?

The short answer is it they way that some phone Android manufactures disable background services once an app is closed. The article below on Medium gives a very detailed explanation of the situation and how you can resolve the issue with your app users.

Here’s a quote from the article about solutions to the problem:

Alright, what’s the solution?

In the end, the user will have to perform the steps manually. This can not be programmatically enabled for all devices. The best we can do is to make it as easy as possible for app users to do so.

Create a support article

Kelly O’Brien and I wrote an article which makes an attempt to identify all the device manufacturers with this problem and explain the steps to enable Push Notifications on those devices. You can read about it here.

Inform users in-app

As I mentioned before, not everyone takes the time out to complain. I can not expect users to contact the support team or search for the support article online. At the same time, there’s no easy way to automatically identify if Push Notifications aren’t working when the app is closed.