What is android-background-work?

Guidance for running Android app tasks when the screen is not open, such as syncing data, uploading files, or doing scheduled work. It explains how Android limits background activity to protect battery life.

Planning and implementing WorkManager jobs, foreground services, exact alarms, and behavior affected by Doze or App Standby. It also helps make background tasks observable and testable.

Background code that works during development may be delayed or stopped by Android on real devices. This helps choose an allowed approach and test that the work actually runs.

android-background-work — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by GuillemRoca: Guidance for running Android app tasks when the screen…

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods

npx agentmods add skills/guillemroca/agent-skills-android/android-background-work

Any agent

npx skills add GuillemRoca/agent-skills-android --skill android-background-work

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/GuillemRoca/agent-skills-android

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install agent-skills-android, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 29 skills, 7 commands, 3 agents, 1 hook.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/guillemroca/agent-skills-android/android-background-work.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/guillemroca/agent-skills-android/android-background-work)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/guillemroca/agent-skills-android/android-background-work"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/guillemroca/agent-skills-android/android-background-work.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Per session 54 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,736 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5	$0.00054	$0.01736
Opus 5	$0.00027	$0.00868
Sonnet 5	$0.00011	$0.00347
Haiku 4.5	$0.00005	$0.00174

Measured 5d ago against content hash 6abb2e23fdb5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

android-background-work scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/android-background-work/SKILL.md · 163 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 163 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Android Background Work

Overview

Background execution on Android is a negotiation with the OS, not a right. Doze, App Standby buckets, foreground-service type enforcement, and exact-alarm policy all exist to kill battery-hungry work — code that ignores them runs fine on the developer's charging Pixel and silently never runs in the field. This skill picks the correct primitive for each job and makes background work observable and testable.

When to Use

Syncing data, uploading files, or refreshing content off-screen
Scheduling periodic or deferred jobs
Long-running user-initiated tasks (export, media processing)
Anything currently "solved" with GlobalScope.launch or a raw Service

Skip when: The work only matters while the screen is visible — use viewModelScope/lifecycleScope and let it cancel with the UI.

Core Process

Step 1: Pick the Right Primitive

Decision table — default to WorkManager:

Need	Primitive
Deferrable, guaranteed (sync, upload)	WorkManager `OneTimeWorkRequest`
Periodic (≥15 min interval)	WorkManager `PeriodicWorkRequest`
User-visible ongoing task (playback, navigation, recording)	Foreground service with a declared type
User-facing alarm/reminder at an exact time	`AlarmManager.setExactAndAllowWhileIdle` + `SCHEDULE_EXACT_ALARM`/`USE_EXACT_ALARM`
Work only while UI is alive	Coroutine scope tied to the lifecycle — not background work

Choosing a foreground service for deferrable work, or exact alarms for "roughly hourly", fails Play review and drains battery.

Step 2: WorkManager Done Right

Constraints and backoff instead of retry loops:

val syncRequest = OneTimeWorkRequestBuilder<SyncWorker>()
    .setConstraints(
        Constraints.Builder()
            .setRequiredNetworkType(NetworkType.CONNECTED)
            .setRequiresBatteryNotLow(true)
            .build()
    )
    .setBackoffCriteria(BackoffPolicy.EXPONENTIAL, 30, TimeUnit.SECONDS)
    .build()

// Unique work: a second "sync now" tap must not enqueue a second sync
WorkManager.getInstance(context).enqueueUniqueWork(
    "sync", ExistingWorkPolicy.KEEP, syncRequest
)

Read the full file on GitHub · 163 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

5d ago First seen · 163 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A 6abb2e23fdb5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

android-background-work is a skill published in the GitHub repository GuillemRoca/agent-skills-android (2 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 1,736 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

Mobile agent-skills agentic-workflow claude-code gemini-cli github-copilot skills

imagegen-frontend-mobile

Elite mobile app image-generation skill for creating premium, app-native screen concepts and flows. Designed for iOS, Android, and cross-platform mobile products. Prioritizes clean hierarchy, comfortably readable text, strong multi-screen consistency, controlled color palettes, non-generic creative direction, textured…

firstsun-dev/skills · 126 tokens

sleek-design-mobile-apps

Use when the user wants to design a mobile app, create screens, build UI, or interact with their Sleek projects. Covers high-level requests ("design an app that does X") and specific ones ("list my projects", "create a new project", "screenshot that screen").

firstsun-dev/skills · 64 tokens

healthkit

Read, write, and query Apple Health data using HealthKit. Covers HKHealthStore authorization, sample queries, statistics queries, statistics collection queries for charts, saving HKQuantitySample data, background delivery, workout sessions with HKWorkoutSession and HKLiveWorkoutBuilder, HKUnit, and…

firstsun-dev/skills · 86 tokens

android-background-work