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Comment by snprbob86 | Hacker News Reader

As an iPhone owner: I have no idea what a "task killer" is or why I would even consider using one...

I'm a supporter of Android (I know many happy Android owners), but this post screams to me "Apple does the things they do for good reasons".

EDIT: Sheesh. I had read the article. I was referring to keeping these sorts of things out of the app store. I'm familiar with the task model of the Android SDK and understand that this isn't a problem with Android, it is a problem with the open ecosystem. Open ecosystems are a good thing sometimes, and they are a bad thing sometimes.

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"Now, it’s true that there are task manager apps in the Android Market. But they are not necessary. The Android system doesn’t come with one and doesn’t need one... There are a lot of things I like better about the iPhone than Android. The multitasking architecture, however, has been an Android advantage, and iPhone OS 4, I think, will pretty much put them on equal footing in this regard. There are technical differences, but they’re small differences, not big ones."

http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/mobile_multitasking

The point of the article is that on Android, you don't need to know what a task killer is either, since it's not necessary.

The device that you own is irrelevant, a "task killer" kills tasks. If it were any more clear you'd be able to see through the phone.

Additionally, the point of the post is that using the task killer is bad and that "Google does the things they do for good reasons". At no point does Apple even factor into the equation.

I'm a long time iPhone owner (just upgraded to 4 from my 3G two weeks ago) and just received a Droid X on Friday through work (my first Android phone); I'll be carrying both for the foreseeable future. I'm digging various aspects of the Droid, but WOW is it easy to end up with a ton of processes running on the thing - and it is very annoying to have to go over to my task killer frequently to shut them down. According to this article I've been "doing it wrong," so I'll let them all run freely for a while and see what is what.

At the moment I think I prefer iOS 4's version of "almost-multitasking-sometimes", but we'll see how I feel after I get used to the 'droid way of doing things.

Android shuts down the processes at the end of the task queue if it needs more system resources. Running a lot of apps isn't a concern - this isn't Windows.

The reasons I was given for shutting down the tasks wasn't system resources - it was battery life. That reason may be bs as well, but I'm not sure how the Droid would decide when to kill processes at the tail of the queue to conserver battery life. Does it expire them after a certain period of inactivity? Only allow X apps to run at Y% battery?

Think of apps more as asynchronous event handlers rather than processes. When you take an action, some app wakes up and handles the event. They are always memory resident, but that doesn't mean they are doing anything.

If I understand correctly it depends on how well or badly behaving the applications are. I believe the judgment Android makes to close down an application is primarily free memory (not battery life).

This gives a basic overview of how application activities behave (see the diagram a few lines down):

http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals.html#...

It is possible for a badly behaving application to create a thread which would continue to run whilst an activity is not visible.

Take this as a common example for an Android game app framework: http://www.helloandroid.com/tutorials/how-use-canvas-your-an...

Your app may need (implementation specific) to take explicit action (SurfaceView::surfaceDestroyed) to stop the rendering thread before being backgrounded,

The point of this is that you don't need to shut them down. The android system does that for you.

The idea of processes consuming resources is a mental model people developed on desktop OS's that they need to shed for Android. When each process is assumed to correctly serialize its state and can be killed at any time without consequence, the OS can keep the system perfectly snappy without the user having to worry about it.

This is a user education problem, not a technical problem. This is why android doesn't make it easy to see what processes are actually running.

I'll agree that it is a user education problem if that is the case. The first thing every Android user told me after I told them I was getting the Droid X was "download Advanced Task Killer." Every single one. I'm certainly willing to adjust my use now that I know I'm using the phone improperly, but this is by no means something that I was alone in being mistaken about. (Also not sure why I deserved a downvote for what appears to be a popular mistake.)

My own personal experience agrees with the need for Advanced Task Killer. When I leave my nexus one alone for a few days, it inevitably starts to slow down (sometime pausing for as much as 10 seconds totally locked up). I'll open adk, and see that I have 40M of free memory. I kill everything, and the phone is instantly snappy and quick again.

It doesn't need doing as often as on my old G1, but it needs it. I don't know if that is because I am running cyanogen mod (5.0.8, which is based on 2.1) or what, but you can pry adk out of my cold dead hands. Maybe I have some buggy apps. But adk makes my phone usable.

Android doesn't seem as smart as it supposed to be, but I still like it.

You have a misbehaving app. My N1 goes for weeks with no problems, and that's been the case with stock 2.1, CM5, and the Froyo-based CM6. Find the bad app and nuke it, rather than perpetually treating the symptoms.

To be fair though, this exposes a design flaw in Android. Technologies like protected memory and pre-emptive multi-tasking are supposed to prevent applications from gumming up the works. Along the same vein, we need some way to identify and limit the resource usage of apps on Android. So now I can go do binary search on my applications to see which one the bad one is, but am I supposed to tell my girlfriend to do that on my old g1? It's a BAD (broken as designed) issue with Android.

iOS4 has one. At the home screen double press the home button. Then just hold an wait on an app for the option to kill it. I've used it a few times. Sometimes apps need smacking around.

Do you often "hear" articles, regardless of content or relevance to Apple, screaming "Apple does the things they do for good reasons"?

Rest assured, lots of non-Apple users have plenty to say about Apple products & services. You learn to smirk and click on.

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