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Comment by troygoode | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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,

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