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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

“While it’s not a capability used by many Fire TV apps, without it, Fire TV apps can no longer perform certain advanced tasks, such as freeing up internal storage space by clearing the cache of all installed apps”

That seems like a failure of the OS. Why should apps have to force that?

So what else does it do? That’s the only example in the entire article. It’s not clear to me at all why this is necessary other than “I already had it so don’t take it away”.

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>Why should apps have to force that?

it's not clear that they do, or that this functionality is necessary or helpful in any way. "cache-clearing" apps have always been popular on android, and they range in effectiveness from being useless to being actual scams. but people like to push buttons to feel as though they're optimizing performance somehow.

Perhaps because to this day, Android refuses to provide the basic, fundamental, user-facing feature of making a process go down and stay down. All we get instead are lame excuses about complexity of battery management or such other nonsense, despite all the reluctantly added battery optimization functions are all nerfed versions of regular task manager.

It's called uninstalling. The whole point of having an app installed is so that its activities / services can run or other apps can use the providers and services it has. For apps on the system partition settings will let you disable the app which will have a similar effect.

No, the whole point of having an app installed is to have an icon you can tap to bring up said app when you need it. Same way as with desktop: installing != running.

But the example wasn’t about apps not running when the user didn’t want them, it was about wasted cache space.

When devices ship with 8GB of storage, average users may or may not follow system prompts to free up storage on an ad hoc basis. (This is analogous to 16GB iPhones and constantly having to free up space). More savvy users can figure out that FireTV is Android compatible and use adb as a power tool. Or just buy a different streaming device that doesn't run at 75% storage full after installing YouTube and Netflix.

But none of that should be necessary. Caches should be managed by the system. If they get too big the system should empty some of it.

Giving the user a prompt is a bandaid on the OS failing to do its job.

It does. But cache clearing only goes to a certain point after that it will stop you from updating apps and installing new apps, until you free up space by uninstalling an app.

That I understand. That’s a user caused issue, it’s fair to ask the user a question.

Or you could provide a feature like iOS where unused apps are unloaded automatically (if enabled).

But the user should never have to manually manage cache space.

User never has to manage cache space which has always been the case. Also your normal user cannot do that, without system level privileges. Third party apps where to able to call adb directly on FireTV which is not the case on other Android devices with GMS. In fact if you build Android with access for third party to call adb, Google will never let you pass CTS and you cannot have Google Play on it. It’s a huge misstep from security point for Amazon sell devices with adb access for third party apps.

Don't even get me started on Samsung's Nexus S, which is partitioned into 1 Go "internal" and 15 Go "external" space with a bunch of apps being extremely annoying about insisting on being installed in "internal" space only...

Because users want to do it. It's absolutely none of your (or Amazon's) business why. How did we ever get into this bizarre situation where supposed "tech people" are questioning whether basic functionality should even exist? This billion dollar company is not your friend.

Users want to do what? That was my question. What useful thing does this allow besides the single example in the article?

And if you don’t want to be beholden to a billion dollar company, maybe don’t buy suspiciously under priced hardware from them that is obviously subsidized by their ad/service empire?

And again, I contend this is not basic functionality. The example in the article isn’t basic functionality, it’s a bandaid on a broken OS.

Storage and memory management is basic functionality. OSes universally suck at this. Partly because they can't predict the future and are mostly reactive in their behavior. Partly because they can't reason. The user can.

>Users want to do what? That was my question

NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!

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