Vivo, iQOO, Oppo and Realme: stop the phone killing your alerts

On Vivo and iQOO phones, allow the app High background power consumption and turn on Autostart. On Oppo and Realme, open the app’s battery page and turn on Allow background activity and Allow auto launch. Then lock the app in recent apps, and alerts stop arriving late.

You can usually tell this is your problem by when things go wrong. The phone behaves all afternoon while you use it, then the “your rider is outside” notification turns up after the rider has gone, or a message from home appears only when you pick the phone up in the morning.

Why do Vivo, Oppo and Realme stop apps in the background?

To save battery, all three close apps that aren’t on screen and block them from starting again on their own. Vivo and iQOO run Funtouch OS or OriginOS; Oppo runs ColorOS; Realme runs realme UI, which shares a lot with ColorOS. None of this is clearly documented. Don’t kill my app, an open-source site that collects these restrictions by brand, says Vivo’s limits “have not been fully uncovered yet” and that apps loading from the background need a special Autostart permission (its Vivo page). Its Oppo page lists the auto start-up and background switches, and its Realme page notes that Realme at least gathers most of them in one place, the Battery section.

That last point is worth praise. Realme puts the switches where you would look for them. Vivo scatters them across the battery screen, the app list and a separate Autostart list, and that, more than the restrictions themselves, is why it is so easy to give up on a Vivo and decide the app is broken.

How do you keep an app running on these phones?

The steps are nearly the same on all four brands. Only the names change. Do them for the few apps that must reach you, not for everything.

1. Open Settings › Apps, pick the app whose alerts come late, and open its Battery or Battery usage page.
2. On Vivo and iQOO, allow High background power consumption. On Oppo and Realme, turn on Allow background activity and Allow foreground activity.
3. Turn on auto-start: Autostart on Vivo and iQOO, Allow auto launch on Oppo and Realme. If you can’t find it, open Settings and search for “Autostart” or “auto launch”.
4. If the same page has Optimize battery use or Battery optimization, switch it off or set the app to Not optimized.
5. Open recent apps and lock the app’s card, by swiping it down or through its menu, until a lock icon shows.

Vivo and iQOO

On recent versions the background switch is under Settings › Battery, in a list called High background power consumption; on some versions the list is called Background power consumption management instead. Find the app and allow it. Autostart has its own list, usually under Settings › Apps › Autostart, and on old Funtouch versions it was inside i Manager under App manager. Search Settings for “Autostart” to skip the hunt. The app’s own battery page may also offer Battery optimization, where Not optimized is what you want.

Oppo

ColorOS keeps the controls on the app’s info page. Open the app, tap Battery usage, and you should see Allow foreground activity, Allow background activity and Allow auto launch. Older ColorOS versions called the last one Allow Auto Start-up and offered a few power saver levels per app instead. If there is a choice between them, pick the one that lets the app run in the background.

Realme

Realme UI has an App battery management list, on newer versions under Battery › Power saving settings. Each app there has Allow auto-launch, Allow foreground activity, Allow background activity and Optimize battery use; turn the first three on and the last one off. Two Realme extras are worth checking. App quick freeze freezes the apps you add to it, and a frozen app can’t send notifications at all, so make sure your chat or bank app isn’t on that list. Sleep standby optimization switches the phone into low power mode when it thinks you are asleep, which is exactly when a night message matters.

Is it worth locking the app in recent apps?

Yes, especially on Vivo. A locked app is skipped when you clear recent apps, and Don’t kill my app reports that locked apps are safe from being ended in the background there. On recent Vivo phones you swipe the app’s card down and tap the lock; on others the card’s menu has a lock or Lockdown option. Oppo and Realme work much the same way: pull the card down or open its menu, then tap the lock.

How can you test it in a minute?

Lock the phone with the screen off. From a second phone, or the app’s web version on a laptop, send yourself a message and count. If it shows up within a few seconds, the switches are working.

Then run the test that matters on these brands: at night. Realme’s sleep standby feature kicks in when the phone thinks you are asleep, and battery limits on all of these phones tend to tighten the longer the screen stays off, so ask someone to message you late in the evening, after the phone has sat on the table for an hour. A pass at minute one doesn’t prove much on its own.

What if alerts still arrive late?

Rule out the plain causes first: Do Not Disturb, a muted chat, or the app’s notifications switched off after an update. After that you need evidence, not guesses.

Message Alarm has an Activity screen that lists the notifications it checked, the ones that matched your rules, the ones that rang, and why a match didn’t ring (a daily or weekly limit, alarms muted, another alarm already ringing). If a message you know was sent isn’t there at all, Message Alarm never received it, so the phone’s background limits are still in the way. With Smart Tray on, Home also warns you when Android paused Message Alarm for 30 minutes or more. And if you want a full log of what arrived and when, see notification history on Android.

On these phones Message Alarm’s “Fix background issues” card does part of the work for you. Battery takes you to set its battery use to Unrestricted, and Auto-start opens the Vivo, Oppo or Realme auto-start screen for you. Android doesn’t tell apps whether auto-start is on, so the app then asks “Is auto-start on?” and goes by your answer. If the screen it opens looks different, the instruction is simple: find Auto-start or Background activity and allow it for Message Alarm.

Do the same settings fix chat, email and banking apps?

Yes. Any app that has to wake up to tell you something is stopped by the same switches, whether it is a chat app, an email client, a bank, a ride app or a camera doorbell. Repeat the steps for each one you rely on.

Moving to another brand later? The idea carries over, the names don’t. See Xiaomi’s Autostart and Battery saver, Samsung’s Never sleeping apps, and Phone Master on Infinix and Tecno.

Once alerts arrive on time, Message Alarm can make the urgent ones impossible to sleep through. It rings an alarm, even on silent, when a message comes from someone you name or contains a word you choose, the same idea as an SMS alarm for texts. The free plan covers 2 watched apps, 3 app alarms a day and 15 a week, plus 2 auto-replies a week. Smart Tray, Quiet mode, saved and deleted messages, history, spending, bills and the smart features are free without limits. No ads, and your messages are checked on your phone and never uploaded.