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He's right about one thing: Multitasking on Android is something of a disaster from a UX perspective. There's no intuitive and obvious way to see what's runni

He's right about one thing: Multitasking on Android is something of a disaster from a UX perspective. There's no intuitive and obvious way to see what's running, and 'quitting' an application is often inconsistent and non-obvious. Most people just push 'home', and treat it just like an iPhone. Of course, performance and battery suffer. This leads to weird contortions in user behavior. For example, my father-in-law's favorite application on his Droid is 'Advanced Task Killer'. From my perspective, the fact that the application even exists is horrifying. A phone should not require sysadmin tools. In stark contrast, look at how WebOS handles multitasking. You know exactly what's running at any given point, because you have a visible card up. To close an application, flick the card up and off the screen. It's intuitive and obvious, even to non-technical people. It's really an amazing design. My suspicion is that Apple will never allow multitasking on the iPhone unless they can make it Palm-like in it's simplicity. However, that would probably require a major UI refactor, which is not going to happen any time soon. EDIT: This contains some bad info. See thread below.

theBobMcCormick 17y ago
Actually, he's completely wrong about multitasking on Android, and BTW, your father-in-law is (IMHO) wasting his time with "Advanced Task Killer". That app is in general a waste of time. Refer to my post elsewhere is this thread for more detail, but the short version is that apps don't need to be specifically killed on Android. Apps do not normally run in the background at all, they are stopped as soon as they're not user visible anymore. Apps that do wish to do things in the background, like play music, can register a service process, which is kind of like a background worker thread. The service process is the only thing that actually runs in the background.
- megaduck 17y ago
  I'm happy to be corrected on this particular point. From appearances, it looked like they'd taken the Windows Mobile model and made it even worse. Good to hear that it's actually sensible. Apologies for spreading bad info.
  - theBobMcCormick 17y ago
    No need to apologize. We're all friends here right? Besides, the odds are good you'll get to return the "favor" one of these days. :-) BTW... The mis-information about how Android background apps work is pretty widespread, so I wouldn't feel bad about having it incorrect. Heck, that's what I believed the situation was until I got an Android phone. :-)
- akgerber 17y ago
  Here is a flowchart! Everybody loves flowcharts! http://developer.android.com/images/activity_lifecycle.png http://developer.android.com/images/activity_lifecycle.png

theBobMcCormick 17y ago

Actually, he's completely wrong about multitasking on Android, and BTW, your father-in-law is (IMHO) wasting his time with "Advanced Task Killer". That app is in general a waste of time. Refer to my post elsewhere is this thread for more detail, but the short version is that apps don't need to be specifically killed on Android. Apps do not normally run in the background at all, they are stopped as soon as they're not user visible anymore. Apps that do wish to do things in the background, like play music, can register a service process, which is kind of like a background worker thread. The service process is the only thing that actually runs in the background.

megaduck 17y ago
I'm happy to be corrected on this particular point. From appearances, it looked like they'd taken the Windows Mobile model and made it even worse. Good to hear that it's actually sensible. Apologies for spreading bad info.
- theBobMcCormick 17y ago
  No need to apologize. We're all friends here right? Besides, the odds are good you'll get to return the "favor" one of these days. :-) BTW... The mis-information about how Android background apps work is pretty widespread, so I wouldn't feel bad about having it incorrect. Heck, that's what I believed the situation was until I got an Android phone. :-)
akgerber 17y ago
Here is a flowchart! Everybody loves flowcharts! http://developer.android.com/images/activity_lifecycle.png http://developer.android.com/images/activity_lifecycle.png