> as absolutely no one should be delivering information silently to a device they don't own.
That's a very very very shallow thinking. You are advocating to break the internet. You are destroying every internet protocol that ever existed. They all silently deliver information to devices you likely don't own.
Actually, we wouldn't need these dirty perversions with notifications if we had a proper background mode for apps. Like, you know, proper computers had for maybe 60 years.
> Actually, we wouldn't need these dirty perversions with notifications if we had a proper background mode for apps. Like, you know, proper computers had for maybe 60 years.
It's worth noting, however, that desktop and laptop PCs have a surplus of energy relative to mobile phones, so it's no big deal if there's a bunch of processes running in the background doing their thing… usually, anyway, because on PCs it's also shockingly common for background processes to misbehave and consume far more resources than they have any right to. Point in case, the daemon for my Logitech mouse will sometimes consume 120% CPU for no apparent reason for extended periods if I allow it to run.
I could see an argument for extending background capabilities in iOS while also heavily also reducing their potential for bad behavior, though. For example, allowing apps to run in the background indefinitely, but on low power cores only with heavily capped CPU and memory consumption, along with a new Settings page that shows a list of persistent background processes and gives the user direct control over them.
Did you happen to not have an internet connection at the time? I noticed years ago Dropbox would spike CPU usage on my Mac when WiFi was off or couldn’t reach the outside world, like when on airplane WiFi but without paying for internet access.
Or, give people easy to use task manager that shows background processes, with big buttons labeled "kill", and "kill and keep down".
Android doesn't have anything like it either. It's my number 1 complaint about smartphone experience ever since I bought my first one: the phone actively refuses to give user insight and control over what's running on their device.
Recently, yes. Wasn't really the case for most of the lifetime of Android project, at least if my memory serves. Also even today, the application section is barely usable as it is.
Contrast that with e.g. the task manager on Windows. It's not a pinnacle of UI, but it's easy to use, communicates necessary information, and gets the job done.
In early android we had more insight and control over processes, but unfortunately we lost that supposedly due to abuse by apps (which seems highly likely)
I think the use cases for running in background indefinitely are so few that it's better to build special purpose APIs rather than general processing on low power cores with caps. The settings page would help but I think it is too complex for the average user to think about. Mobile phones are not PCs and we shouldn't be striving to make them more PC like, even if we can do so under mobile power constraints.
I think it may be best if there's a wide variety of battery capacities in phones, rather than a raised minimum capacity across the bar.
If battery power is universally plentiful, you'll get something of a road expansion effect where developers simply take advantage of cheap power and bloat apps to fill the added capacity, returning you to square one with phones struggling to last a day.
So with that in mind, the best case scenario may be for manufacturers to keep their current thin models but also introduce new ultra-high-capacity models, so apps are optimized reasonably well and users can take full advantage of the extra capacity.
I agree. User should decide, how he will use his battery power. If an app requires background running, it should be allowed to, with full control over data and battery used. That's all users need.
Story time: Years ago the Signal app would silently wake up in the background, upload 20MB+ of my contacts’ photos, and then shutdown and do it all over again every time I received a silent notification. Due to my membership in a few large groups this was very often. The result was gigabytes of cellar data usage in a week.
Fortunately my experience was rare because I both had a lot of contacts with photos and I ran the desktop app. But it was infuriating to track down and it made me realize that silent wake ups were even possible on iOS. (Or used to be)
I don’t know what the right balance is, but I think there should be some middle ground.
Fun fact: Apple still allows signal, telegram, WhatsApp and few other high profile developers to use VoIP notifications without mandatory calling up VoiceKit. Because they can't work as smooth as users are used to they work with these new rules for notifications.
So, no, nothing 'improved' in your Signal experience. At least, not yet.
All developers are equal, but some are more equal than others.
On deaktops, neither windows nor dlinux do not behave differently depending on developer's name. I see no reason why mobile devices should be any different. I wonder if there are grounds for anti-monopoly lawsuits.
Windows absolutely does: it has a large collection of various hacks in place to detect specific applications to keep the running across newer versions of Windows. This is neat in a technical sense, but you’ve gotta be on Microsoft’s radar and worth it for them to put that sort of effort in for you.
On top of that, the partner support you used to get from Microsoft if you were a developer they cared about was orders of magnitude more helpful and useful than what you’d get if you weren’t a preferred partner.
I mean, if the apps is built for current windows, it runs and has all access to all APIs the system has for apps. So apps like Transmission will load after startup and will be seeding torrents in the background, you don't have to be on some special list to do that.
The Apple philosophy is “give users zero agency” – and from that stance, yes, this is a fix. But I remember the days when a computer program was either a game, an extension of the user's will or the BIOS; by that philosophy, this should absolutely be possible. (But computers have been artificially complexified to the point that this isn't viable.)
Surely you mean fixed, not broken, as absolutely no one should be delivering information silently to a device they don't own.