On Thursday, May 10, 2012 1:30:02 AM UTC+2, Dianne Hackborn wrote: > > Yes well there is this meme spread by certain perhaps not unbiased > entities that having multitasking at all, I mean doing multitasking like > Android, is bad because it is intrinsically battery consuming. This is of > course not true -- if you create a process and it sits there doing nothing, > it ain't going to drain your battery. > > The difference between Android and some other platforms is that it does > give background code a lot more freedom to do what they want and run when > they want, so they have more freedom to do stuff that will drain your > battery. Android does have some safe-guards for this -- it looks for some > fairly clear signals like background processes using wake locks or CPU > excessively and kills them if this happens, and a UI to help the user > understand how applications are using their battery. It doesn't have such > rigid control where there are only X specific types of things that can be > done in the background. It's a different set of trade-offs, but background > processes being intrinsically more battery draining is not one of those > trade-offs. >
Perhaps the Processes and Threads section in the Dev Guide could make it more clear that it is up to each app to stop its background threads and otherwise ensure they don't do anything when they're not in the foreground then? Seems like a fairly common mistake that is difficult for most users to understand, they just notice that their phone gets slower over time. Which is why, I guess, some games recommend that you force stop all cached processes before playing. Not very user friendly. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
