ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Chris wrote on 03/08/15 22:40:
> 
> ...
> 
> I am not a coder, but adding option to white-list apps (so everyone
> can choose set of favourite apps to white-list) seems like a good
> idea. It looks similar to scopes - you select scopes that you
> always want accessible.
> 
> On top of that - app developers could make some special "white-list
> compatibility mode" that keep certain qualities of apps readily
> available while muting others - less important.
> 
> ...

Closing apps wastes battery and makes your phone slower. The next time
you want to use an app that has closed, it has to reload into
memory, then reload and reconstruct its saved state, neither of which
would have been necessary if it had stayed open.

Many people do not understand this. Even worse, they think the
opposite -- that closing apps will make their phone faster somehow.
This is understandable if they're used to PCs, which do work the way
they imagine: background apps can consume processing time, and by
sitting in RAM they may cause a foreground app to use slow swap space
instead. But neither is the case in Ubuntu Touch. Background apps are
put to sleep, so they don't take up processing time.[1] And swap space
is small, and may not even exist at all in the long run,[2] because if
memory is really needed the OS can just close background apps
automatically.

[1]
https://samohtv.wordpress.com/2013/08/15/application-lifecycle-model-policies/
[2] https://launchpad.net/bugs/1385406

So, the only reason for you to close an app manually is when a bug has
put it into an unusable state. What, then, would be the purpose of a
whitelist to make an app uncloseable? Only if you were supremely
confident that the app would never get into an unusable state. Because
if it ever did, and you couldn't close it, your only recourse would be
to restart the entire phone.

Why would you be so confident that an app will never get into an
unusable state? Two possible reasons. Either you've used the app for
years, and it has never screwed up -- but nobody has used any Ubuntu
Touch app that long. Or you've reviewed the code yourself, and you
know that it's exceptionally bug-free -- but you said you aren't a
coder, which rules out that possibility too.

This is not the same as customizing scopes. The purpose of customizing
scopes is to let you switch between the scopes you use, without having
to wade past scopes you never use. The app switcher would not benefit
from anything similar because it shows apps in order of recency, so
apps you aren't using shuffle out of the way automatically.

- -- 
mpt
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