ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Thomas Voß <thomas.voss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 11:45 AM, Rasmus Eneman <Rasmus@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Some thoughts:
> There definitely are legitimate reasons to let apps run in the background.
> A game on Android I like very much is Turf, it uses the GPS to track you
> when you goes around and take "zones". While playing, I usually listens
> to music. And bam, a common use case where we want two apps in the
> background (maybe I gets a SMS and don't change back to one of the apps
> I'm "using").
>
> So app definitely needs a way to run in the background and prevent sleep.
> I think Android solves this very good using Activity’s and Services. An
> activity is what shows the graphical interface, everything you see is an
> activity. Activitys can't run in the background. Services however can't show
> any graphical interface but can tun in the background.
> This is good as it forces developers to write good behaving background
> services (in the meaning of, it doesn't do any graphical stuff when not in
> the foreground).
>

Yup, we are proposing a very similar approach that dispatches tasks to
services that are allowed to run in background (potentially with CPU
time and/or memory being restricted).

> To this Android also have a battery menu in the system settings that show
> how much battery every app have been using, which makes it easy to find
> out which app drained my battery.
>

I do disagree with requiring the user to interact with the system to
ensure longer battery life. We should try as hard as possible to make
this automagically work.

> There are other use cases than GPS and music, apps that download stuff
> for example (http, torrent, or whatever), apps that measures the
> accelerometer and finds out when I'm sleeping very light.
>
> Personally I don't think a crippled way of running background tasks is the
> best way to fix battery issues, instead let the user choose and help him
> do it by displaying as much information ass possible.

For a tech-savvyy audience: Yes. For everyday users I do disagree. In
the end, users do blame the platform for bad battery life (for a good
reason) and we certainly don't want to have battery life preserving
apps in our app store (Google Play has got quite a few of them).

Thanks,

  Thomas

> Maybe there could be a setting in the battery menu "let apps run in the
> background" that would make it possible for people to save as much
> battery as possible if they want.
> A default setting could be to disable this when the battery reaches 15%
> or something.
>
> 2013/10/22 Alberto Mardegan <alberto.mardegan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>>
>> On 10/22/2013 09:59 AM, Thomas Voß wrote:
>> > Along the same lines of the metronom app: If the gps app is in
>> > foreground, the location service should signal to powerd that it
>> > should not suspend at least the gps, probably the network, CPU (and
>> > thus, memory access).
>>
>> Why does it matter if the app is in the foreground or background? A
>> navigation app needs to continue runnint anyway, even if it's in the
>> background.
>> Shouldn't the location service also signal to the shell (or to whatever
>> component is responsible for apps lifetime) that the app is using the
>> GPS and shouldn't be stopped?
>>
>> (if not: how would you solve this use case?)
>>
>> Ciao,
>>   Alberto
>>
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>
>
>
>
> --
> Rasmus Eneman