Damn you Android and your weird constraints. Apparently the thread pooling got changed in Android 7 and all the AsyncTasks do not get executed. One can convert those to IntentServices, which would run in the background just fine. However, there can be only one IntentService running, so using one for a background task that continuously listens to some changes blocks the execution of any new IntentServices. Then there's the generic Service, but that requires some manual house keeping to keep its state in order. Grr…