I think it's ridiculous that you need an app to approximately control other background apps. Denying background access to the phone should be the default. Anything else should need a permission popup IMO.

iOS gets close to what you want. Apps have to ask for specific permission for specific reasons (location, background download, etc), otherwise it just get killed after a few minutes.

Security is always at odds with convenience. It's easy to require a pop up to ask for permission every time and have user getting so used to these pop ups that they just automatically tap "yes"

I agree. Apps shouldn't be able to just run background processes willy-nilly, and I hate how that drains my battery for no good reason.

> The only annoying and inexplicable thing is that some apps run their own background process for push notifications, rather than using GCM, so pushes stop coming in if you kill those.

There are valid reasons for this, e.g., if you want your app to work on Android devices without the proprietary Google applications.