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Don't kill my app

dontkillmyapp.com

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Re: Don't kill my app

#21

Post by erlendellingsen »

osener wrote: post #20
sebtron wrote: post #17

I think many commenters supporting the "kill my app" behavior do not understand how bad using the affected devices can be. The reason I first discovered "don't kill my app" is that my apps would close as soon as I switched to another one, in most cases. For example if I used maps and switched to a call / browser tab / Telegram chat, when I got back to the map the app would reload. My search would be gone, and I would…

This somehow seems to have become an inevitable reality of mobile phones. I had to upgrade from my iPhone 7 because it had essentially become a “single-process OS” where even switching to Google Translate to help me compose a message would have the messaging app killed in the background. And now I am experiencing similar issues, although not as severely yet, with my iPhone 12 Pro Max. Restarting the phone seems to he…

Never experienced anything remotely similar as you described with either my iPhone X when I had that, or my current iPhone 12 Pro..

Re: Don't kill my app

#23

Post by sooheon »

erlendellingsen wrote: post #21
osener wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This somehow seems to have become an inevitable reality of mobile phones. I had to upgrade from my iPhone 7 because it had essentially become a “single-process OS” where even switching to Google Translate to help me compose a message would have the messaging app killed in the background. And now I am experiencing similar issues, although not as severely yet, with my iPhone 12 Pro Max. Restarting the phone seems to he…

Never experienced anything remotely similar as you described with either my iPhone X when I had that, or my current iPhone 12 Pro..

Happened to me many times browsing restaurants / using a map during recent trip with 13 mini. Sucks to suffer a map reload when you're on roaming data with few bars.

Re: Don't kill my app

#24

Post by ClassyJacket »

sebtron wrote: post #17

I think many commenters supporting the "kill my app" behavior do not understand how bad using the affected devices can be. The reason I first discovered "don't kill my app" is that my apps would close as soon as I switched to another one, in most cases. For example if I used maps and switched to a call / browser tab / Telegram chat, when I got back to the map the app would reload. My search would be gone, and I would…

I despise that this still happens today on a phone with 8GB of RAM. EIGHT GIGABYTES. That's what they sell the MacBook Pro with, but Android, built for low memory devices from the ground up, can't consistently keep a single application in memory in the background for just a few seconds. You can literally switch for five seconds and the last app has to reload.

This drives me absolutely nuts.

Re: Don't kill my app

#25

Post by kqr »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #19
sebtron wrote: post #17

I think many commenters supporting the "kill my app" behavior do not understand how bad using the affected devices can be. The reason I first discovered "don't kill my app" is that my apps would close as soon as I switched to another one, in most cases. For example if I used maps and switched to a call / browser tab / Telegram chat, when I got back to the map the app would reload. My search would be gone, and I would…

Why can't the app save its state to storage and restore the saved state when it's started again?

I feel like this is how Android has been designed from the start.

Ages ago apps used to have a bug where form contents were cleared if the user switched from portrait to landscape orientation -- same problem: developers assumed they could store state in instances of input fields, when in fact these would be re-instantiated when the view was significantly re-rendered.

This specific case seems like a continuation of that misunderstanding and a difference in intuition between Android architecture and PC developers, rather than an actual fault with Android.

Re: Don't kill my app

#26

Post by [deleted] »

sebtron wrote: post #17

I think many commenters supporting the "kill my app" behavior do not understand how bad using the affected devices can be. The reason I first discovered "don't kill my app" is that my apps would close as soon as I switched to another one, in most cases. For example if I used maps and switched to a call / browser tab / Telegram chat, when I got back to the map the app would reload. My search would be gone, and I would…

[deleted]

Re: Don't kill my app

#27

Post by [deleted] »

potyarkin wrote: post #7

Most apps on my phone were strong armed on me by trend-following (or outright data grabbing) businesses. 99% of them could've been just a website - but no, I can't reschedule my doctor appointment via website, because "our app is so much better and has so much more features!" So fuck yeah, kill them all! And if they dare to start on their own, kill them more!

[deleted]

Re: Don't kill my app

#28

Post by toast0 »

jraby3 wrote: post #12
Torlan wrote: post #4

Don’t kill my battery

The best hack I’ve found for iOS (iOS isn’t even listed in the article) is keeping phone in low power mode.

iOS apps are built around Apple's policies which are more or less uniformly enforced on Apple phones. iOS apps started with near zero background compute and that was only added later.

OTOH, Android apps started with near zero restrictions on background compute and it's been added on in bits here and there. Two different Android phones may have drastically different policies and not because the user chose it. App developers can have difficulty making sure things work on phones where the manufacturer sets policies that limit when it can run or how it stays resident.

It's not always easy doing that for Apple, but there's not ten different ways you have to do things for ten different manufacturers.

Sure, there's tons of apps out there that have no business running in the background. But for every one of those, there's stuff that really needs it to work and the user wants it to work; the page on Samsung says some firmware versions would kill background execution if you hadn't used an app in 3 days, so if you had a weekly alarm in the clock app, and don't load the clock otherwise, it would likely not fire. That's not reasonable, and it's not what the user wanted or expected.

Re: Don't kill my app

#29

Post by numpad0 »

sebtron wrote: post #14
Torlan wrote: post #4

Don’t kill my battery

Can't you close your apps when you don't want them to stay open? The reason I first discovered "don't kill my app" is that my apps would close as soon as I switched to another one, in most cases. For example if I used maps and switched to a call / browser tab / Telegram chat, when I got back to the map my search would be gone. So no please, don't kill my app when I don't want you to.

Not sure what you meant by that - mobile apps don't have main() or exit(), they are driven by onThingsHappen(Event event) calls. When the OS decides to call `onYourAppIsResumedFromAltTab(context SwappedOutMemoryContent)` instead of `onYourAppWasJustLaunched(void)`, your app can resume functioning. The former is more likely to happen on devices with larger RAM space. You as an app developer don't have full control over it, unlike how it is(used to be!?) with Win32 apps.

Re: Don't kill my app

#30

Post by happymellon »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #19
sebtron wrote: post #17

I think many commenters supporting the "kill my app" behavior do not understand how bad using the affected devices can be. The reason I first discovered "don't kill my app" is that my apps would close as soon as I switched to another one, in most cases. For example if I used maps and switched to a call / browser tab / Telegram chat, when I got back to the map the app would reload. My search would be gone, and I would…

Why can't the app save its state to storage and restore the saved state when it's started again?

I was thinking the same.

But I'm not an app developer so there is presumably a reason for that. Data exfiltration?

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