How to prevent VLC from closing when paused for around 5 hour At the moment, I use the VLC application for my music on my cellphone. Recently, they pushed out an update that moved everyone away from the beta application to the normal one.

Since this update, I'm noticing the fact that the application shuts down after you pause the music for around 4-5 hours.

This behavior ready broke my workflow, where before I only had to plug in my audio cable, I now need to plugin my cable, unlock my phone, open VLC, manually add every audio file in my files, and then turn on shuffle, before I can enjoy my music 2 times a day.

How do I make VLC stay active during periods of inactivity?
I have installed to VLC v3.0.5 on Android 7 and have not had a problem thus far. It could be an Android specific problem or networking if you use streaming media. I only playback music and do not watch videos or internet streams on VLC. Here is how I went about with the updated VLC.

In existing install of VLC. Go to phone's setting and choose App. Choose to clear cache and clear data. Then uninstall.

Install VLC from Play Store. At installation, give it time during parsing media stage (monitor the progress window), if anything interrupts it then you will have to manually add media files. Takes me just over 3 minutes to clear parsing media stage.

Allow permission to

Photos, media and files on your device

Draw Over Other Apps

add device SD card to medialibrary

Hope this helps.
The only permission I did not give it is, 
Allow write system settings.