ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Benjamin Zeller <benjamin.zeller@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Am 26.06.2014 14:36, schrieb Michael Zanetti:
> On Wednesday 25 June 2014 12:47:02 Marc Deslauriers wrote:
> [snip]
>> As I said, I don't want to prevent background services, I want us to do it
>> in a way that most people would find reasonable, and using the principle of
>> least astonishment. I'm pretty sure when people close their flashlight app,
>> they don't expect it to be running in the background and tracking their
>> location.
> That's why I for one (as a user and a developer) would be really happy with 
> the option for the user to allow an app to be kept running (as in running, not 
> suspended). Sort of like this:
>
> An app indicates that it has features which require to keep running and 
> processing data. If the user starts that app for the first time, the system 
> asks the user: "App X asks for permission to keep processing data even while 
> the display is off. Please note that this might affect your battery lifetime. 
> Accept/Decline. (You can change this setting in the system settings at any 
> time)".
Great idea, you could do the same with a background service, when its
started
the first time the user is told about it and can always change his
decision in the
settings.
>
> If the user declines, the app will be suspended when unfocused and some 
> features might not work. If the user agrees, the app would not be suspended 
> and support all the use cases that came up in this thread. However, if the 
> user closes the app's window, that would also stop the process in any case. 
> That would make it quite clear to the user what's running and what isn't.
Hm we could have the same behaviour if we require the bg process to be in
the same process group and terminate the whole group when closing the app.
That way we get background tasks without the full application running
all the time.

>
> I'd also be fine if this question only pops up if the user has qualified as 
> power user (e.g. a setting to enable this advanced stuff) and just decline it 
> automatically for non tech savvy people.
But how should the user know about the not working features if the dialog
does not pop up because he did not select "poweruser" mode?
>
> If the developer needs to do things even when the app is completely closed, 
> that's when a set of restrictive, predefined system services like push 
> notifications etc should help out.
>
>
> I'm not really concerned about the app being quit by the out of memory killer. 
> If we're out of memory we're out of memory, there's not much we can do about. 
> Maybe the OOM killer could try to stop non-background enabled apps before 
> others and try to be smart in order to minimze the risk of interrupting such a 
> background task...
Yep
>
> br,
> Michael