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Android vendors, don’t kill my app

dontkillmyapp.com

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Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#131

Post by handzbagz »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #20
me551ah wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Killing background tasks is great and Android does that automatically to save battery usage. But these manufacturers have implemented their own functionality on top of Android which cripples even critical messaging applications like WhatsApp, Slack, Gmail by not delivering Instant Messages notifications instantly.

I don't want Slack or Gmail to deliver notifications instantly. I'd love to have functionality that saves battery by delaying them.

Don't most apps use GCM to deliver notifications anyway?

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#132

Post by finchisko »

I don't understand why manufacturers are trying to solve problem for user. User has power uninstall app that is draining battery or replace it with something else. There is rating and comment section in app store exactly for this. What they could do instead is to display warning that app is using too much battery, but they SHOULD NEVER KILL AN APP.

It may sound radical, but only countermeasure we developers have is to block installments of our apps on such devices until moment manufactures stop doing this nasty "optimizations". It's like taking users as hostages, but that exactly what manufacturers are doing as well.

PS: for all down voters, I would like to hear from you if you just android user or you've also developed some app (I doubt you did).

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#135

Post by giancarlostoro »

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…

LG even lets you pin apps you don't want auto-killed which is useful but I rarely use it since I kill them manually before it gets to do it for me, I didn't realize this was an issue on other phones. I guess that's why LG is technically not on this list? I've always thought it was a stock Android feature.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#136

Post by Wintamute »

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.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#138

Post by me551ah »

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…

Killing background tasks is great and Android does that automatically to save battery usage. But these manufacturers have implemented their own functionality on top of Android which cripples even critical messaging applications like WhatsApp, Slack, Gmail by not delivering Instant Messages notifications instantly.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#139

Post by scarface74 »

sudhirj wrote: post #77
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…

And yeah, the permissions model in Android vs Apple is different, but multi tasking in particular feels the same. i.e. Apple has fine grained permissions on demand for contacts, microphone, camera, location, etc, and requires that all apps gracefully degrade when permissions is denied. But for multitasking there isn’t really any fine grained permissions - as long as the app is doing a whitelisted task in the backgrou…

Technically, you could have an app that plays silent audio in the background to keep from getting killed and then do something else, but that would get flagged by the review process.

But, if I recall correctly, VLC will continue a background file transfer session from its built in web server on iOS if you play a movie in the background. Otherwise it will be killed after 10 minutes.

Re: Android vendors, don’t kill my app

#140

Post by sublupo »

Battery saving is needed for apps like WhatsApp. Even after doing a force kill to Whatsapp, a few seconds later, I see that it opened itself. I can't find a way to close WhatsApp and not have it open until I tell it to. The only option I could find (for a non rooted phone) is to use a VPN and route WhatsApp to a non existent address
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