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Comment by giarc | Hacker News Reader

I have never owned an Android device however recently had some exposure when a colleague asked about battery life. I went through her settings etc to see what was enabled/not enabled and found a battery graph. It gave a breakdown of how much power each app was using and a graph of the battery charge over time.

I was quite impressed. There is no native iPhone equivalent and I find most 3rd party apps that claim to track data/battery are not 100% accurate.

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Users only need that on Android because the OS doesn't manage power consumption of apps adequately.

An iPhone app is capable of sitting in the background tracking your location with battery draining GPS, too.

Only navigation apps are allowed to do that.

Location tracking doesn't drain your GPS. I have at least 4 apps running using location tracking on my iPhone (albeit with the help of the M7) and can go 6+ hours only losing 20% of battery life (implying 30 hours of use.)

The key, of course, is that the phone was in my pocket for 95% of those 6 hours. Actually using it drains far more battery than all those location tracking apps combined.

It's somewhat disingenuous to say that the OS doesn't manage power consumption adequately; it defers to apps to let them decide what resources they need and when, which permits for a hell of a lot more flexibility than iOS (remember when Pandora wouldn't play music in the background for approximately forever?), at the cost of a misbehaving app chewing up more battery than it should.

It's not disingenuous at all. What you describe is the user managing power consumption rather than the OS.

That's incorrect. The OS still does plenty of power consumption management, but it allows apps to tell it when they want the device to stay in a high-power state, because often you need that for legitimate functionality. It also allows the user to be the ultimate arbiter of power management because apps get it wrong sometimes. To conflate "doesn't impose tight restrictions on resource usage" with "doesn't do power consumption management" is silly.

Nope. This a straw man - nobody said android "doesn't do power consumption management".

The claim was "the OS doesn't manage power consumption of apps adequately". My counterclaim is that it's perfectly adequate (when apps manage their locks well, the OS management of power consumption works just as you'd expect) but that Android simply defers judgement for what is an acceptable lock to the app (and the user) rather than imposing restrictions that save power at the cost of functionality. It uses a cooperative strategy, rather than a restrictive strategy.

If what you meant is "Android allows apps to consume power when iOS wouldn't", then yes, you're right. That's quite a far cry from "Android doesn't manage power consumption adequately".

Sorry, more straw man. You have taken that claim out of context.

Android forces the user to do power management where iOS does it for the user. If the user is involved where they don't have to be, that is inadequate.

Nothing you have said contradicts that.

His argument is not a straw man and Android does not force the user to do power management, as you claimed. It is an optional.

Optional if you want good battery life, sure.

The stated claim seems entirely in context. And in fact, your restated argument is still rebutted by the post you're replying to. You can't just say "straw man" or "out of context" and then provide no explanation to those claims. Well, obviously you can, because you have been, but it makes your arguments fall flat.

I would restate the grandparent's claim to further argue, but clearly that's an effort in futility.

It's not rebutted. Nowhere does he address the point that android makes the user manage the power where iOS does not. Instead he simply attempts to reframe the debate into the usual old saw about Apple's approach being restrictive vs Android.

This simply does not rebut the idea that Android is making the user do the work, whereas iOS is doing it for the user. It just tries to make it sound like a good thing rather than a failing.

Your assertion that Android makes the user manage power is so far off base that it's difficult to speak to. It permits the user do, but neither expects nor demands it. The average Android user has no need or desire to proactively manage their power usage by killing tasks or whatnot. You're tilting at windmills here.

When exactly did you last use an Android device?

What is the value of permitting it if it's unnecessary?

Surely it hasn't escaped your notice that it's rather par for the course for Android to give users the ability to do things they way they want, whether necessary or not.

Android doesn't presume to dictate acceptable feature sets for applications; as a result, sometimes apps will do things that the user did not expect or want (which may still in fact be a valid feature of the app, or may just be a bug), and then it provides tools to allow users to identify and correct the problem if it is unacceptable for their use case. This is the pathological case, though, and not the norm. The general assumption is that the user's preferences trump the OS's, which is a large part of the reason that so many people like Android to begin with.

Of course it hasn't. You are precisely stating my point.

Android requires the user to do more work because it manages less of the experience itself and offers needless choices.

The reason so many people like Android is because it is cheap, widely available, and can be tailored to the carriers wishes. No serious commentator believes that it's because the majority of people want to manage power consumption manually.

In theory, it's pointless on an iPhone because only the app you're directly using uses any significant power.

This guarantee has diminished over the years. Before iOS 4 (which allowed third-party apps certain types of background multitasking) it was pretty much ironclad. Multitasking started to chip away at it, and they've added more and more multitasking modes (which is, overall, a great thing) making for more and more opportunities for apps to eat your battery in the background.

My personal experience is that the ideal still mostly holds, with a big fat exception in the form of VoIP apps like Skype which get to use up way too much power if you leave them logged in.

It's probably to the point where a battery monitor would be useful now, but it's not a particularly great need, and inertia will probably keep it away.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. Android offers:

1) Generally much easier rooting/access to bootloader/custom ROM installation than iOS. 2) Install custom keyboards, home launchers, icon sets 3) Change default web browsers, caller, messaging apps to third-party alternatives 4) Full access to filesystem 5) Fully customisable homescreen widgets 6) Full sharing intents system 6) Generally more "computery" interface - downloads displayed in notifications pane for example.

And of course you have the advantage of a choice of a range of devices with much larger screens than an iPhone.

It's just a shame that the Android UX experience is so chaotic. A consequence of Google never really seeming to settle on a single UI vision beyond "different enough from iOS to avoid legal action."

1) That's not a feature. The carrier's devs are just worse than Apple at securing their products.

More work for the user to do is a symptom of a less advanced system.

this!

I could reply that a computer system which fails both to satisfy me with its out-of-the-box experience, and to offer any way for me to tweak that experience to my tastes, is even less advanced.

You could, but that would be a spurious argument since it could apply to anything you didn't like.

If you don't like iOS, just say so.

I don't like iOS.

I am sorry, but I read that as Android offering 1) an easy way to make your phone completely unstable and possibly break it permanently; 2 (and 5)) a variety of ways to make your already chaotic phone UX even more ugly and unusable; 3) ways for third party apps or social engineers to replace core system features with adware-infested malware (like browser toolbars on Windows)....

6, I like, though; applications providing services to one another is a great idea. But when you combine that with "full access to the filesystem", you don't -need- an intents system for inter app communication, you can just save files and open them in different apps. It's this kind of inconsistency of what Android is actually trying to do - be computerlike, or be a walled garden 'appstore' ecosystem - that contributes to the overall chaos of the UX.

I don't know, you might want to try it out before you dismiss it completely.

Rooting/installing ROMs is completely optional. It's just there if you want it, and it can be a lot of fun. You did buy a pocket computer after all - don't you want to see what it can do?

I use Swiftkey instead of Google's stock keyboard, and Firefox instead of Chrome. Both are quality apps which look great, have zero malware issues, and seriously enhance the quality of my smartphone experience. The improvement is way beyond what you can get on iOS, simply because Apple won't allow anyone to modify the core experience so deeply. And I haven't explored the offerings in full - I still use the stock caller and messaging client. I'm confident that high-quality alternatives are available.

I use simple stock widgets currently - Gmail and Google Calendar only. They look great, they're simple, and again they seriously improve my phone experience. Again, I haven't really explored widgets yet but I'm sure there are some seriously powerful, high-quality options available.

And the filesystem is only visible if you download an app for it specifically. Out of the box the file management is similar to iOS, just more powerful with the intents system. This isn't an example of Google not being able to make up their mind, they've just decided to allow people to explore that side of the system if they want.

Android is really a great system for people who like computers. All of the things which Apple decided people shouldn't be interested in doing with their pocket computers are available in some way on Android. It's very gratifying for curious people.

It's fair enough to say that all these options come with dangers. But they also come with potential! Great potential.

> You did buy a pocket computer after all - don't you want to see what it can do?

I just bought a phone, which happens to be a computer. If I really want to get deep into a 'pocket computer' I buy an Arduino or an equivalent and hack it's guts.

As a mobile dev I'm more than happy about the access level that I have with iOS, I can even throw in-line Assembly there.

Cheers.

For me currently, I would love to see iOS allow the default browser to be switched. I use Chrome on my iPhone but all links open in safari. Frustrates me to have multiple tabs open in multiple browser apps. I also don't want to switch from Chrome since I use it on PC and home laptop so my bookmarks sync.

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