Background Sessions and Notifications

While Deputy Shell has a live session, it keeps that session running in the background using Android's foreground-service mechanism, showing an ongoing notification (for example, "Deputy Shell session running," or a count when several sessions are active) with a Stop Session action.

Notification permission

Deputy Shell asks for notification permission once, the first time you actually have a live session — not immediately at launch, and not repeatedly. If you decline, your sessions keep running normally; you simply won't see the ongoing-session notification until you enable notifications for the app in Android's Settings. You can always come back to a running session through the app itself.

Notification permission currently controls Deputy Shell's ongoing live-session notification. The current release does not send a separate background notification when an agent is waiting at an approval prompt.

Limits on background survival

Android and individual device manufacturers can still stop background app activity — through battery optimization, aggressive task killers, or system-level foreground-service limits. Deputy Shell does not claim sessions survive indefinitely in the background: if the system ends a session's process, that session is marked as needing resume rather than silently pretending it's still running, and its notification is removed.

Background reliability has so far been validated primarily on one Samsung device; behavior can vary on other manufacturers' more aggressive battery-management systems.