That persistent notification for application running in background is the worst. Back in the day, applications on Symbian devices could run in background without any indication. Some would argue that's a risk but then we have been using our PCs like that since forever.

Even if you want users to give indication of something running in background there are far less intrusive ways to achieve that. But if you can't come up with those ways and persistent notification is the best you could come up with then at least give the user the ability to turn it off without turning off background process?

They know the tendency of people to clear notifications as they clutter the phone and they use this small knowledge to push their own Software. At least follow same practice for Google apps but no because then that notification area would be complete mess.