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Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that every app thinks that they must run in the background. Every app must have millisecond push updates for their social media network that another Like was just received. Worse yet, most of them don't know how to do so in a symbiotic way. It makes complete sense that OS manufacturers have taken a stand to protect users from bad developers. They don't want the blame and they want to keep selling devices.

It is a tough spot. How do you have open app stores and not have them filled with malware? Android hasn't figured this out yet. Users are dumb and will just click on anything. They need to be protected from themselves sometimes.

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Well, it's understandable that many apps want to run as a regular process. Good old UNUX was and it's GNU/Linux descendants are quite OK with it. The users have control and can choose which apps to run and which not. If some app misbehaved, it was up to a user to identify it and remove a problem.

But Google decided that it will be our nanny and will guard all users against misbehaving apps, whether the users asked about it, or not, and you can't refuse this care. That is tyranny and should be fought against.

Now, I don't think that push notifications are bad. They are rather good idea and let them be. It is the monopoly on push notifications which is bad.

> How do you have open app stores and not have them filled with malware?

Long before the 'app store' term was coined, Linux had software repositories, which worked like magic, and without issues:

    sudo aptitude install libreoffice

Boom, you now have libreoffice on your PC! If repositories had massive problems with malware, I'm not aware of them. So it was done decades ago and can be done again.

Comparing Unix/Linux running on a PC and a iOS/Android running on a smartphone is insanity.

And comparing software repos with app stores is just as bad.

I'm not even quite sure how to address what you're saying, because it's just so completely out of touch with how smartphones are used.

I like the idea of being able to connect my phone to different software repos.

Play Store would be one among many.

I think then there would soon be curated repos for well behaved apps that don't abuse push notifications and background abilities.

That is basically what f-droid allows you to do, add different repos. Though google play doesn't provide a repo that fdroid, obviously.

Alternative app stores are not a problem on Android. There are lots of them. Alternative way to deliver push notifications is a problem. Currently, to solve it in a satisfactory fashion you need an alternative ROM to connect to a different push service.

> Comparing Unix/Linux running on a PC and a iOS/Android running on a smartphone is insanity. And comparing software repos with app stores is just as bad.

Strange idea. How is comparing two types of consumer-market computers and ecosystems is "insane"?

The parent comment is pretty legit IMHO.

Calling Unix/Linux a "consumer-market" OS is quite a stretch.

You should update your knowledge of modern operating systems.

My mom and my wife parents are extremely happy with Ubuntu computers. They do browsing, email, Skype, print stuff and whatever else they need just fine. That are way more happy with Ubuntu than they were with Windows, and I am, too, cause in the last three years I have spent exactly zero minutes maintaining their computers. If that's not a consumer-market OS, I don't know, what is? Windows? When mom used it, she always had one problem after another with it. I'm truly sorry for anyone who has to deal with it every day.

> Well, it's understandable that many apps want to run as a regular process. Good old UNUX was and it's GNU/Linux descendants are quite OK with it.

On the other hand, we invented inetd so that we didn't have to keep server processes running all the time when they are only lightly/sparsely used.

Not really -- on Linux, I can (and I do) disable the daemons. Moreover, most apps are sane, and work well without background daemons (KDE/Gnome being the exception, but they offer no unique functionality not available anywhere else)

This is not the case on Android. Looks like every app wants to run in the background and drain my battery. Even seemingly foreground-only things like maps apps install background services.

Ideally, I'd prefer to have an explicit list of apps which are allowed in background.. but missing that, I guess I will have to settle on automatic guarding.

The reason you don't have a way to disable a background app on Android is because you don't have means to do so. Google could have made controls easily, but they give you automatic guarding instead, which you can't refuse.

What are Google's motives? Do they really care about their users, or do they simply want more control over user devices?

The battery usage reports on Samsung phones are pretty well done, with graphs and all.

Users will also be prompted to kill an app if it's detected running in the background a lot. That's perfect because there are many cases where only the user knows whether the app updating in the background is important to them or not.

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