Here is part of your battery drain and notification problem.  Pandora starts doing work in the background as soon as you turn on your phone. These are DNS requests from a phone that has just been booted without Pandora ever being opened.  This continues forever while your phone is on.  They keep ignoring my claims about Pandora constantly phoning home.  Here is proof. 01/08/24 20:21:46 stats.pandora.com 01/08/24 20:21:46 stats-proto.pandora.com 01/08/24 20:27:27 stats.pandora.com 01/08/24 20:27:27 stats-proto.pandora.com 01/08/24 20:32:33 stats-proto.pandora.com 01/08/24 20:32:33 stats.pandora.com 01/08/24 20:37:52 stats-proto.pandora.com 01/08/24 20:37:52 stats.pandora.com 01/08/24 20:43:48 stats.pandora.com 01/08/24 20:43:48 stats-proto.pandora.com 01/08/24 20:49:17 stats.pandora.com 01/08/24 20:49:17 stats-proto.pandora.com 01/08/24 20:55:00 stats.pandora.com 01/08/24 20:55:00 stats-proto.pandora.com ... View more

You seem to be ignoring the main problem I was discussing in my original post, which is Pandora phoning home every 5 minutes like clockwork.  How convenient to re-categorize and merge my original post about the phoning home into an only slightly related thread.  The notification popping up might just be a side effect of a bug related to the fact that something is running in the background to constantly talk to Pandora servers.  That would also explain the battery drain that people are mentioning.  The bug may be that the notification is popping up when it shouldn't, but the fact remains that it should not be running in the background at all if I am not using it.  You seem to be keeping it running to communicate with your servers and inconveniently, that background process is showing its ugly face by allowing the notification to surface.  Those two things put together prove the app is running in the background when the app is not in use and communicating with your servers. I have monitored the other media streaming apps on my phone since I subscribe to several, and Pandora is the only one that is constantly phoning home when not in use. ... View more

No audio is playing most of the time.  I have had very rare occasions where music starts playing without any interaction on my part.  Usually, the notification just pops up out of nowhere when I have not used Pandora recently but does not start playing.  Much of the time there is no sign that Pandora is even running besides the fact that it is performing DNS queries every 5 minutes to the previously mentioned domains.  I have no idea what functionality besides tracking would require that.  Being a very seasoned developer, I have hunted down other apps that have displayed similar behavior, which turned out to be tracking without my consent.  I have not gotten to the point of intercepting and decrypting the traffic yet. Since I have uninstalled the app and cancelled my subscription, I am not going to bother going that far.  To me, that is suspicious behavior, and I will not re-install or re-subscribe until a reasonable explanation for that behavior is provided. ... View more

I have been having the random auto start issue with Pandora on and off for a while that many other people have complained about and have not been able to solve.  I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that Pandora is constantly phoning home to stats-proto.pandora.com and stats.pandora.com.   It happens every 5 minutes even when Pandora is not running.   I find this behavior unacceptable and will be uninstalling it from my Android device and cancelling my subscription.  I have posted about this before but it seems my post was somehow deleted. ... View more