I finally found the Android setting that kept closing my apps without warning

I used to think the smarter the phone, the less you had to think about it. That turned out to be precisely backwards. Somewhere between Android getting better at managing itself and phone manufacturers deciding to improve on that aggressively, a setting crept into my device that had full authority to shut down my apps in the background without telling me, without asking, and without any trace of a paper trail. Messaging app notifications get delayed, and anything that needed to stay active just didn’t, the moment I left the app.