Don't kill my app • Hacker News Board

Re: Don't kill my app

#81

Post by resonious » Fri, Nov 24, 2023, 10:10 AM UTC

guappa wrote: post #78

resonious wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Android dev is unnecessarily designed in a way that makes saving data require a lot of code. If you know what you're doing, you can mmap a file, put all your working memory in there, and let the OS save it for you. No serialization or parsing necessary and memory access is exactly the same as usual with no overhead. You'd think that using a managed language would make it easier to abstract and support this ki…

How to kill solid storage with one easy trick! Please don't do this.

How does it kill solid (state?) storage compared to writing JSON or SQLite constantly? Genuine ignorance on my part.

Re: Don't kill my app

#82

Post by isodev » Fri, Nov 24, 2023, 4:26 PM UTC

g-b-r wrote: post #79

isodev wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the app's point of view both are the same - the app can no longer execute code and upon resume it must restore state.

Suspending means that its memory was preserved, so the app doesn't have to do anything !!!

While suspending may be the first state, the OS can choose to fully evict the app from memory if it needs it for other tasks. So a "good app" saves state before being suspended so that upon resume, it can restore from disk even if it was "killed".

Re: Don't kill my app

#83

Post by WirelessGigabit » Fri, Nov 24, 2023, 9:47 PM UTC

Honestly, it's not just Android. iOS exhibits the same issue, and of-course Safari is exempt from this policy.

When you're in Edge, switch apps, and go back, the amount of times Edge RELOADs the page is staggering. And of-course, reload means re-fetch from the server which isn't necessarily idempotent.

Yelp & HikingProject (REI): Same issue...

And given Apple's control over the ecosystem it's quite weird that tombstoning (what it was called on Windows Phone) isn't enforced, even though it's one of the most jarring experiences of using 'apps'.

And frankly, that would cover 99% of all battery life issues. The only reason these apps want to stay alive is to maintain state. State that can perfectly be serialized & restored.

Re: Don't kill my app

#84

Post by g-b-r » Mon, Nov 27, 2023, 5:37 PM UTC

isodev wrote: post #82

g-b-r wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suspending means that its memory was preserved, so the app doesn't have to do anything !!!

While suspending may be the first state, the OS can choose to fully evict the app from memory if it needs it for other tasks. So a "good app" saves state before being suspended so that upon resume, it can restore from disk even if it was "killed".

Yes, but in practice almost all apps don't do it always with the complete state,; and on phones that don't kill them so easily most of the times you can switch between apps without problems.