If you have a Nexus or Pixel device running Oreo, you’ve likely seen the “[app name] is running in the background” notification. While useful, this is also quite annoying. Fortunately, a new app will remove this notification permanently.

Why Does This Notification Exist?

Before we talk about how to get rid of it, however, let’s talk about why it’s there in the first place.

Basically, in previous versions of Android, there was no real way of knowing if an app was running in the background doing a bunch of stuff it’s not supposed to be doing. In most scenarios, these misbehaving apps would wreak havoc on the battery by keeping the system awake—these are called “wakelocks.” In laymen’s terms, it was keeping the system from sleeping. That’s bad.

With Oreo, Google is calling out developers that let their apps do this sort of thing with the new notification. Essentially, if an app is running in the background and chewing up battery life, this new notification will tell you.

NOTE: There are a few legitimate scenarios where an app will continuously run in the background, like the VPN service running in the above screenshot. Often, however, apps are running in the background unjustifiably.

So, Why Disable the Notification?

Honestly, because people just hate superfluous notifications—even ones that are useful, such as this one.

It’s worth noting, though, removing the notification does not solve the issue. Period. There’s a reason this notification exists, and getting rid of it will do nothing to solve the underlying issue. You’ll either need to change a setting within the app or uninstall it altogether.

As long as you understand that and still want to remove it, let’s do this thing.

How to Disable the “Is Running in the Background” Notification

Because this is a relatively crucial system setting, there’s no way within Oreo itself to remove it. That makes sense.

But like with most things, the developer community has found a way to remove it, and developer iboalali released an app to do just that. It’s actually just called “Hide ‘running in the background’ Notification,” which is about as straightforward as an app name could ever be. Go ahead and give it an install.

Once installed, fire that guy up. The first thing you’ll have to do is gran the app Notification Access. It’ll walk you through the process—there’s nothing to it.

A couple of taps will throw you into the Notification Access menu, where you’ll give the app permission.

 

A warning will give you more details, so just accept that.

Boom, that’s literally all there is to it.

If you ever want to re-enable the notification, just jump back into the app and disable Notification Access. Done and done.