The techniques and systems disclosed herein generally pertain to managing permissions for applications to allow the applications to run in a background state by an operating system. In some embodiments, user interfaces may be used to allow users to manage application permissions without requiring the user to understand specifics of background applications, but rather by providing a predetermined threshold number of permissions that the user can assign to applications. When the predetermined threshold number of permissions has been allocated and a subsequent application requests a permission, the user may replace or swap out an application that currently has a permission by giving the permission to the requesting application.