ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Rick Spencer <rick.spencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 5:43 AM, Florian Will <florian.will@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Am 25.10.2013 19:48, schrieb Thomas Voß:
> > One thing that strikes me: Instead of trying to solve the problem a
> > lot of "won't work" statements are made in this thread, going along
> > with a request for removing all of the lifecycle policies. And to be
> > clear: With strict policies in place, it is always possible to find an
> > example that breaks. So I think we can stop collecting breaking
> > examples here.
>
> I disagree. If you want Ubuntu Touch to be successful, you need users.
> And users want apps. In order to be able to offer a rich selection of
> apps, you also need app developers. Limiting app developers to basically
> create wrappers around system services might alienate them.
>
> Sure, in order to avoid the android background service mess, a strict
> lifecycle policy is required and I like most of your ideas. Create
> powerful system services that make it possible to do stuff easily and in
> a power-efficient way.
>
> But there *are* apps where "one size fits all" doesn't work and
> something like an actual background service (or wakelock & no suspend)
> is required. Any app developer who whishes to create such an app will be
> unhappy and might consider not creating anything for Ubuntu Touch at all.
>
> The more "breaking examples" we can enumerate, the more app developers
> are possibly affected. Let me add one breaking example that sells (from
> my "poor student" POV) relatively well on Google Play and had more than
> 200k downlods and a rating of 4.5/5 in the short time span when it was a
> free download, so there is an interested user base for something like that.
>
> The app takes a file produced by some other popular app. That file grows
> larger than a few MBs quite fast. The file's content is analyzed and the
> app creates statistics based on the file contents. Since that process
> can easily take a few minutes (sometimes 20 minutes) even on modern
> hardware, it is done in a background process while holding a (partial)
> wakelock. Every night the statistics are updated (taking <1 min
> usually), triggered by an alarm and while holding a (partial) wakelock.
>
> The only possible solution for this on Ubuntu Touch? "Please wait. ETA:
> 20 mins. Also, please touch the display once every 30 sec and don't
> leave this app. Thank you."
>

This sounds kind of far fetched. Who would do something like this on their
phone?

I think it's fair to point out apps that simply won't work for users
(Spotify for example), but we shouldn't optimize for entirely hypothetical
situations.

Cheers, Rick