When debugging my own app I noticed that the StreamFurious service doesn't shut itself down when idle (the built-in MediaPlaybackService has the same bug). This leads to wasteful use of RAM and battery thrashing.

Check that you have some kind of idle timeout that is kicked off in onCreate() not onStart(). If you've based your work on the MediaPlaybackService you probably inherited this bug from the Android team :( If the service is OOM killed, you receive onCreate but not onStart, so any lifecycle management must be initialized in onCreate.