On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 4:37 AM, Kostya Vasilyev <kmans...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Besides, non of the Twitter apps I've seen so far offers anything but >> >> a general update interval option in the preferences. And Twitter's >> only an example. >> > Ah. > So the issue is with applications. > What you're saying is that all the Twitter clients assume that twitting is > the main / only thing that the user does. That's hardly a good assumption. > Actually the official twitter application has a big "sign out" option in its menu, right next to settings. Also it is important to understand that the app isn't always "running". If you set the update interval to 4 hours, it will only run (in the background) every 4 hours to get new tweets. This may end up with the process always appear to run (if the device has lots of memory), or it may just end up having the process run a bit every 4 hours and then go away so something else can run (like an app checking for e-mail). And if you *really* want to make a spiffy app, you can use C2DM so your app isn't polling, but just launched in the background whenever there is new data for it to retrieve. Anyway the point is that for app which are monitoring/retrieving data in the background for the user, there is a standard way to control this behavior, but turning off background updates. (Either by explicitly signing out like Twitter or Google Talk, or having a "no polling" option in poll intervals like E-Mail, or turning off sync like GMail.) This is not the same as "quiting" the app, though. Just because the app *isn't* doing background updates doesn't mean I can't run it and even explicitly request it to do an update; just because an app *is* doing background updates doesn't mean it always has a process running to "quit". - Users realize that it's ok to just let Android do its thing, because >>> it just works. >>> >> Only as long as the apps don't do anything in background (no matter if >> by service, broadcasts, AlarmManager, ...). If there wasn't a problem >> with that, there wouldn't be so many users which are using task >> managers because they actually do improve performance and/or battery >> usage. >> > There were, and perhaps still are, poorly written Android applications. > Hopefully, as time goes on, applications get better, and there is more > diversity, so one is not forced to use poor applications. > This main problem that task managers have helped with is apps that keep services running in the background forever (consuming memory memory that could be used by others). As of 2.2 they can't impact these (or alarms) anyway. And there is growing system UI to help the user control these apps in a way that actually correctly represents what is going on. Later releases will be improving this UI. But I think it is a false argument that *most* users are using task managers because they actually help. There are *some* things (mostly in the past) that they have helped *some* people for. These people generally didn't understand why they were actually helping, but a meme got started that task killers improve the performance of your device. People have a natural nearly crazy tendency to latch on to these kinds of things -- "hm I'm told pressing this button will make things go faster, let me press it, gosh I think I can tell things are faster!" And this just snowballs -- last year I was disturbed as I stood in a Verizon store in when Droid came out, listening to their sales reps install a task killer on customer phones as they bought them and show them how to use it to kill things to keep their phone running fast. So anyway, we are continuing to work on the platform to: (1) Prevent apps from causing harm to other apps. (3) Improve battery reporting to better identify apps that are behaving poorly. (4) Get increasingly aggressive about identifying bad app behavior and dealing with it automatically. (2) Present better more appropriate UI for users, who want to, to see what is running on their phone and manage it. -- Dianne Hackborn Android framework engineer hack...@android.com Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails. All such questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and answer them. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
