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First I though "Is Nokia bad or good? Then I saw 'bad vendor score'" so I figured they are the worst. Then I got confused about all the vendors having the same score, but a different colour. Then I saw that some of the circles are slightly darker than the others... This type of visual communication hurts my brain too much.
Each vendor has 1-5 poop emojis with Nokia having 5 and Stock Android only 1
tl;dr The author would like to run his app in the background without notifying the user about it, because otherwise the author would just add add an ongoing notification, which would allow the app to run in the background forever on all platforms.
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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 WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) to run in the background on my phone at all times. I don't trust them, especially after Instagram (also owned by Facebook) started using the camera by itself on my phone, without my permission. Slack would be fine, I guess.
I actually like the move to kill background tasks. Don't get me wrong I think they're great when they're needed. But if I only installed the app because the mobile site is crippled I don't want it to destroy my battery polling for content changes when I only open the app once in a blue moon.
Google & manufacturerers have gone too far in the quest for the Holy Grail of extending battery life. To the point where it’s negatively affects the user experience quite often (there are quite a few examples in these comments).
It makes Android overall seem more buggy (for example, not receiving notifications for an instant messaging app is pretty ridiculous, assuming I’ve opted in and want these notifications).
One other big issue is that push-based wake-ups on Android don’t work reliably. For example, on iOS, if you want to wake up the app in the background when you come in range of an iBeacon, you can do so (with user permission), and it just works. Meaning you don’t need to run a special arbitrary background job (which is much less battery efficient).
On Android - BLE wakeups are so incredibly unreliable that entire classes of apps are becoming less and less viable. And without the loophole of running background jobs to manually scan for beacons, users (and developers) are basically shit out of luck.
I haven't followed the scene closely, but isn't it the same behavior as Apple? Can you even do background tasks in iOS?
For example, push notifications are handled by one system process, and will only open the relevant app when the user clicks it.
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I don't want Slack or Gmail to deliver notifications instantly. I'd love to have functionality that saves battery by delaying them.
Both these apps allow you to do that in-app. I have Gmail not notify me for work emails and notify me for stuff on my personal account.
Interestingly though it is possible to remotely detect which users are facing this problem and send them instructions on how to add an app to the device's whitelist. I faced this exact problem in my previous company Flock, and built services to detect and inform users which substantially brought down user complaints. https://hackernoon.com/notifications-in-android-are-horribly...
But how did you guys deal with the situation where FCM delivers and displays a notification without waking your app up. In that case, if the user dismisses the notification without opening it, then it will count as delivered by FCM, but not as delivered by your app, right? Which isn’t actually the case.
Apple took a lot of flak for not having multitasking, but to they credit they took the time to build explicit APIs that allowed apps to handoff certain whitelisted tasks (audio playback, downloads, alarms, notifications) to the OS, and made clear guarantees about the circumstances under which the APIs would work.