ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Michi Henning <michi.henning@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 4 Aug 2015, at 21:17 , Arash <arashbm@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi.
> 
> A phone is a phone and if you don't intend to use it like a phone, you have to deal with the consequences and not the phone makers.
> 
> But to me, this is a text book example of "I need a faster horse" kind of problem. Making application X load faster will not solve anything. It is only a symptom to another problem. I believe Improving application loading time will improve the experience.

While I agree with that as a real concern, it also sounds a bit like "if I had all the money in the world, everything would be cheap".

Working in a constrained environment under pressure of many conflicting requirements is hard. Finding the most palatable trade-off through the maze is what makes for great design. There is no one answer to solving all the problems (only clever answers to particular problems). Keeping the dialer running may well be the right answer, as might be to not keep it running but making it start up really fast.

Making the right trade-off in the face of such conflicting demands is the hallmark of good design. Think about how little the iPhone 3G could do, and how much it changed the world. It did that because designers picked the compromise that pissed off he least number of people while providing the most value to the largest number of people.

If running the dialer in the background solves the problem, and if doing that doesn't steal too much CPU and memory, that's probably a worthwhile trade-off. Meanwhile, improving start-up performance across the board is a worthwhile thing to do too. If start-up performance improves to the point where it's no longer necessary to run the dialer in the background, everyone is better off for it, and we stop running it in the background. In the mean time, if we can afford it, let's run it in the background.

We need both fundamentalism and pragmatism.

Michi.