All right, here's the deal: One of the reasons that motivated the change is battery life, which is a major point of frustration for many Android users. More precisely, we've noticed in our testing that there was a strong correlation between user complaints about battery life and specific applications being installed, and a deeper investigation showed that those apps were indeed causing poor battery life by turning hardware on in a way that users weren't expecting. Restricting access to those settings through an explicit UI was found to be an appropriate mechanism for users to known precisely enough what was going on and to get appropriate expectations about battery life.
Another reason that motivated the change is an overall concern about privacy and abuse. There've been concerns that changing settings like GPS, data roaming, wifi, airplane mode without the user's explicit action for each operation was inappropriate. Both of those areas were broadly reported by users, by carriers, and in the press. 1.5 addresses those concerns based on the feedback that we're received, by putting the user in better control of their phone. JBQ On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 7:19 AM, chrispix <chris...@gmail.com> wrote: > > While I read the blog here : > http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/04/future-proofing-your-apps.html > I almost had a heart attack. Having a location based application, the > number one issue we had was being able to automatically turn on / off > GPS based on an application setting. Which quite frankly makes some > sense. > > Having to prompt the user each time to turn on / off gps is a giant > pain from the standpoint of program flow. > > I have used our applications setting to actually turn GPS off, because > it was faster to open our app and close the app, and turn off GPS. > Rather than opening the settings, and doing it that way. > > I hope you have updated the market so we can respond to all the > negative feedback regarding having to manually enable GPS/disable > GPS. > > The coding change is not the matter. The fact that a useful function > was taken away. Can't there be some way to code GPS state to an > application state? > > > -- Jean-Baptiste M. "JBQ" Queru Android Engineer, Google. Questions sent directly to me that have no reason for being private will likely get ignored or forwarded to a public forum with no further warning. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
