Hacker News Reader

Comment by shareme | Hacker News Reader

ahem, in mobile we do not have quit..nothing broke not even the mobile users :)

Actually, on my Android phone I'm constantly using a third party task killer to stop services and apps running in the background that I thought I 'quit' by backing out of them. I also use the quit option on apps that have it.

I don't entirely trust Android to manage battery life as efficiently as possible yet, especially when iPhone still does it so much better, and when every time I check the services running on the phone, there seem to be tons I had never even started in the first place.

I consider that at least partly a UI/UX issue.

(On a side note, that's my only complaint about Android so far, using 2.3, otherwise it's great.)

Your task killer might be hurting your battery life rather than helping it. In any case, in recent versions (2.1+ I think), Android is better at managing tasks than a third-party app, and overzealous background task killing doesn't help anything.

http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-wi...

Thanks for that article, very informative, but not necessarily conclusive. There are also a ton of comments that resonate with my concerns, about how random apps I haven't touched seem to constantly start themselves and run in the background doing who knows what - using CPU (battery), bandwidth, whatever.

At least one comment mentioned a significant battery life improvement after installing Advanced Task Killer and turning on its autokill feature, which I've been using a few months. I think I'll experiment a little and turn it off, and see if there's any noticeable difference in battery life.

I heard this as well so when I got my android I didn't install one. But the battery life was horrible. Often, if I used the phone regularly during the day the battery would be dead by 9-10pm. I installed a task killer and killed everything when it booted up and killed a couple times a day. After that I suddenly have ~1.5 days worth of battery available. I'm not sure which app was being such a hog (I suspect it's an app that was refusing to let the phone go into sleep mode) but the task killer was most definitely necessary.

You're killing a mosquito with a howitzer, and you may have better battery life by letting Android do what it's supposed to, and find the offending application.

Download "Spare Parts", go into its battery history section, and select "partial wake usage".

You'll find out what (if any) app is keeping your phone in partial wake lock status.

I agree with you. It was one of the hardest things for me to wrap me mind around. I'm constantly looking for the quit button on apps and I always have the urge to use a task killer to kill off tasks. I have seen a visible degrading of the user experience when I leave tasks running in the back ground. I also suspect app developers are not managing tasks correctly leading to inconsistent behavior.

Maybe it's confirmation bias, but I had to learn the metaphor of "no quit option", and I welcome the quit button/option on apps that have them. I have seen many, many users; particularly new Android users; that wonder where the quit button is, and what happens when they just "leave" the current application.

So, no, it may not have "broken" anything, but it has caused significantly wide, if not deep, cognitive dissonance.

... to its detriment, at times. I have a very good app on my iPhone that plots out bike paths around London for me. Sadly, when I have reached my destination, and "close" the window, it continues to use the GPS and other battery sucking things to the point where I have to manually go and kill it via the kill-menu (which is all I ever use the fast-switch menu for).

I'm not saying this is Apple's fault, but that it's very hard to work out when someone has "finished" with an app that could continue to, say, provide information about what the user is doing to a third party, or sucking battery life, or making annoying noises, for example. And apps that do this after I'm "finished" with them annoy me to no end. I'd consider that "broken" :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com