[azerrima]

Here is my problem. I have an app that shows battery status. I want to block this app from running in background and just check the status manually from time to time by launching it.
Well, the blocking setting for the app works for some period of time. I noticed that If I manually run the app frequently (as I'd like to do to check my battery usage pattern), the "block" is removed and the app runs again in the background! Please note that I don't check the box that says it will turn background on the next time you run the app.
I guess WP8 somehow intelligently does this and determines what apps should run in the background. But I absolutely don't need this automatic behavior. The battery app drains the battery fast as it continuously probes the battery status. Any solution to make the block setting permanent?

[BIGPADDY]

The only way is to uninstall the app most of those battery apps take a lot of juice just to run either in the background.

[foxbat121]

Each app can only run in background for 14-day max. So, what majority of these apps do is remove and re-register the background app everytime the app launches manually. This renders whatever your block settings useless. WP8 made some changes to that 14-day thing but even Microsoft recommends devs continue to do the remove and register thingy.

[manicottiK]

^ This is a good point. Also, since there's no way for an app to "know" if background tasks are on or off generally, apps often try to drop and then attempt to re-add their background task to see if they get an error. In doing so, they may, as faxbat121 says, effectively turn their own task back on.

The periodic task API needs further development by Microsoft because of this weakness and because the only way for an app to know about a particular kind of error is to look for a substring of an English-language error message rather than a particular error code number.

[azerrima]

Thank you for clarifying the issue. Hope Microsoft resolves it soon. It's real pain.