Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Android vendors, don’t kill my app

dontkillmyapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 414 posts

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#151

Post by richardwhiuk »

scarface74 wrote: post #143
whouweling wrote: post #126

We are running a (very niche) platform + app for people with special needs, where accurate and offline alarms are necessary: this is a big problem for us. I think about 1/3 of all our support requests are about the app being killed in the background on specific phones. The part of the app that does the actual scheduling of the alarms is a big mess with lots of device & API level exceptions. Debugging alarm problems i…

Does Android not have the concept of “local notifications” where you can tell the OS to schedule a notification to be sent to the app to wake it up instead of being in the background the whole time?

It does - the one that works properly is https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/AlarmMan...

However, the implementations of the API are questionable.

Some calls to that API on some OEMs device round alarms to the nearest minute, some to the nearest ten minutes.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#152

Post by kda26 »

z3t4 wrote: post #117
xyzal wrote: post #90

To be honest, as a user I really like the implementation of battery saving features of my Sony phone: 1. They are not enabled by default 2. Their settings screen explicitly states what the modes do 3. They can extend battery life significantly The most aggressive mode is called Ultra Stamina, and it works by basically turning the phone into dumbphone mode -- complete without any internet connectivity, calls, SMS and…

Interesting. Batteries in smartphones usually have five times more battery capacity then feature phones, it should last over a month!

Smartphones also have 5x more screen to light up, too.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#153

Post by detaro »

scarface74 wrote: post #143
whouweling wrote: post #126

We are running a (very niche) platform + app for people with special needs, where accurate and offline alarms are necessary: this is a big problem for us. I think about 1/3 of all our support requests are about the app being killed in the background on specific phones. The part of the app that does the actual scheduling of the alarms is a big mess with lots of device & API level exceptions. Debugging alarm problems i…

Does Android not have the concept of “local notifications” where you can tell the OS to schedule a notification to be sent to the app to wake it up instead of being in the background the whole time?

It has, but from what I've read some of these "optimizers" helpfully "optimize" the scheduled notifications away or move them around in time.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#154

Post by wor3q »

Traster wrote: post #123
dangerface wrote: post #120

If your app is in the background it shouldn't need a load of resources. These resource limits are there to prevent bad developers using all your resources in the background. If you are having issues with this limit you are probably one of these bad developers. Removing the limit is not the solution, writing a better app is.

So how do you propose to write a sleep tracking app that doesn't run a background process for longer than 20 minutes?

In a way that it has to be explicitly allowed to do so by the user.

I don't need an online store app to eat up my phone's battery, and disabling background by default seems to be only option here.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#155

Post by zingmars »

z3t4 wrote: post #117
xyzal wrote: post #90

To be honest, as a user I really like the implementation of battery saving features of my Sony phone: 1. They are not enabled by default 2. Their settings screen explicitly states what the modes do 3. They can extend battery life significantly The most aggressive mode is called Ultra Stamina, and it works by basically turning the phone into dumbphone mode -- complete without any internet connectivity, calls, SMS and…

Interesting. Batteries in smartphones usually have five times more battery capacity then feature phones, it should last over a month!

It depends on how often he uses his phone and where he backpacks. Being in a low-signal environment will eat up a lot of battery even on a feature phone plus having screens 5x bigger than feature phones also lead to more battery usage when being used. My old OnePlus3 which at this point is only used for alarms and has apps set to auto update (doze is on, but battery saver is off) in the background lasts around a month before I have to charge it again.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#156

Post by CannisterFlux »

traspler wrote: post #45

For me this problem is very real. For example I got my mother a Pocofone F1 (by Xiaomi). Everything works fine, WhatsApp notifications arrive but there are some apps which just get crushed by Xiaomi's battery saver. Audible's lock-screen widget for example just does not show up unless you enable/disable 2-3 battery saving and notification settings after installing the app. I think this incantation can't be expected e…

Another anecdote: my wife and a colleague at work (so 2 different people I know) have Xiaomi Note fives, and this model kills the stock alarm clock app! Regularly for both these people the alarm does not go off. My wife keeps an old Nokia candy bar phone around as a backup alarm it has happened so often. There's a workaround, maybe just placebo?, for this too: you can go to the recent apps screen and pin the app. But any kind of system update seems to undo the fix. I imagine your audible lock-screen widget will have the same issue, that system updates break the fix, and MIUI updates quite regularly.

I have a Xiaomi A1, with a more stock version of Android, and so far this has not been an issue. But I noticed in the recent Pie update that it mentioned "battery improvements". I've had no problem with battery before now, it lasts all day easily and I get home with 70% or so. I hope it doesn't start killing the alarm clock at night, when it's plugged in to charge, just to save battery.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#157

Post by disiplus »

Wintamute wrote: post #136
yason wrote: post #129

Killing apps is a good thing . There have been battery saver programs since the very beginning of early Android versions to kill of connectivity and clean up running apps. When Android now supports some of that natively and vendors too, even more aggressively, this is just responding to users' needs. There is a quite clear usage pattern to support this behaviour: unless I explicitly say so, I don't want apps on their…

Auto-killing apps to save battery is obviously good - nobody is contesting that. The bad thing that is being highlighted here is that there's no user friendly way for app developers to request additional privileges from the user.

we would end in the same place where we are now, apps would nag and require that we put them on the whitelist, I have a huawei mate 20 pro, the biggest reason thah I like this phone is the battery life. it has a huge battery and with agresive management I can go with 50% from morning till evening. there are only couple of apps in my whitelist. everything else its free to manage for me automatically. before that on my nexus device I got annoying notifications from my smart watch watchface app, that was using notifications for promotions and such.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#158

Post by nkristoffersen »

Nursie wrote: post #83
simias wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it also the consequence of taking the control away from the user? Why can't I whitelist which applications I want to allow to run in the background? Why do I still have to grant an application all the permissions it requests when I install it instead of being able to turn them on or off individually? By dumbing things down that way Google created this situation IMO, it's bad from a quality, usability and privac…

> Why do I still have to grant an application all the permissions it requests when I install it instead of being able to turn them on or off individually? I don't think this is true in the later releases is it? I get a lot more ad-hoc permission requests these days, and there's much more control in the application settings (the android app settings, not the settings the app presents).

That is the case in iOS. All permissions are optional and the app must gracefully degrade if permissions are denied.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#159

Post by scarface74 »

Traster wrote: post #123
dangerface wrote: post #120

If your app is in the background it shouldn't need a load of resources. These resource limits are there to prevent bad developers using all your resources in the background. If you are having issues with this limit you are probably one of these bad developers. Removing the limit is not the solution, writing a better app is.

So how do you propose to write a sleep tracking app that doesn't run a background process for longer than 20 minutes?

That’s a solved problem on iOS. iOS itself keeps track of measurements coming from your device even when it’s sleep using the power efficient Mx chip. Applications can then - with user permissions - request the data when needed. This has been the case since 2013.

The app doesn’t need to be running in the background.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#160

Post by BoorishBears »

yason wrote: post #129

Killing apps is a good thing . There have been battery saver programs since the very beginning of early Android versions to kill of connectivity and clean up running apps. When Android now supports some of that natively and vendors too, even more aggressively, this is just responding to users' needs. There is a quite clear usage pattern to support this behaviour: unless I explicitly say so, I don't want apps on their…

It is not a good thing to kill an alarm app then purposely ignore its registered alarms, or killing a media player the user wants to listen to in the background.

You using Ubuntu so you’re fine with wasting time setting up stuff that’s just supposed to work, but most users are not

Case in point:

https://androidcentral.com/blocking-huawei-phones-downloadin...

Post reply on HN