Status Icon in Notification Bar

[horizon]

I see that the settings state "Recommended for proper operation, disable at your discretion".
What's the reason behind keeping it in status bar, sort of like hard-coded without possibility of using clear function to hide/remove it?

[Kostya Vasilyev]

To be as exact as possible, this is the reason:

http://android-developers.blogspot.ru/2010/02/service-api-changes-starting-with.html

Google's desire to prevent apps from doing work in the background without the user being very aware of it.

Now, that's "doing things by the book". If you disable the setting, the app will use its own mechanism to prevent being kicked out of memory at an inopportune time. Based on user feedback, it seems to work fine.