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Good behavior on an iOS device is not enforced by the app store, but by the OS. Background processing is limited on a timer, the OS throttles processes that us

by novok 6y ago

Good behavior on an iOS device is not enforced by the app store, but by the OS. Background processing is limited on a timer, the OS throttles processes that use too much background processing & networking depending on context, etc. The OS also suspends background apps fairly aggressively compared to the foreground app. Mobile apps also give you more tracking variables to do fingerprinting with than browsers do and it's pretty much impossible to practically add a local firewall to iOS devices to block ads. Adblocking isn't a practical thing on mobile apps. Similarly, managing bad 'tabs' is really the browser's responsibility.

mrtksn 6y ago
Do you suggest that browsers should adopt Apple's approach? I kind of like the idea of tabs being active only when selected and browsers rejecting pages that are too much resource intensive. That said, I wrote that in response to the claim that "Developers understand they must play fair on a device that is shared with other developers" but apparently missed to quote it. So no, developers don't play nice, in fact a lot of them are horrible greedy people and that's why we can't have nice things. Ethics are very poor in that profession and that’s why we need very tight screws to have good user experience.
- threatofrain 6y ago
  This is already similar to Apple’s approach, as you can notice tabs refreshing and losing data when you come back to it.
  - mrtksn 6y ago
    I don’t notice such a thing. How can I reproduce it? What OS and browser?
    - ratww 6y ago
      iOS and macOS Safari. In iOS it's mostly when you have a lot of things open and too little memory. In macOS they don't reload (or maybe it's rare) but they do sleep. But it's very hard to notice.
- novok 6y ago
  Yeah browsers do to some point and probably can do more to improve the situation. One annoying thing about apple's aggressive approach although is it's difficult to have actual background processes running on your device. Stuff like arc app keeps on getting shut down, it's difficult to have a mail client or an image syncing service actually be running in the background as frequently as apple's first party ones and so on. Also you can't run something like little snitch on your mobile device. In the desktop case this is ok, since you have the escape hatch of electron apps in the web tech example, but in iOS you don't have anything.
drdaeman 6y ago
> Good behavior on an iOS device is not enforced by the app store, but by the OS. Unfortunately, both. It shouldn't happen, but in practice (on another OS, but I doubt there's a correlation between cognitive capabilities and preferred mobile device vendor, lol) people were installing those "brightest" flashlight apps mindlessly granting them every single permission they ask for. The machines can't yet analyze appropriateness of the request. That's where human moderation comes into play.

by novok 6y ago

mrtksn 6y ago

Do you suggest that browsers should adopt Apple's approach? I kind of like the idea of tabs being active only when selected and browsers rejecting pages that are too much resource intensive. That said, I wrote that in response to the claim that "Developers understand they must play fair on a device that is shared with other developers" but apparently missed to quote it. So no, developers don't play nice, in fact a lot of them are horrible greedy people and that's why we can't have nice things. Ethics are very poor in that profession and that’s why we need very tight screws to have good user experience.

threatofrain 6y ago
This is already similar to Apple’s approach, as you can notice tabs refreshing and losing data when you come back to it.
- mrtksn 6y ago
  I don’t notice such a thing. How can I reproduce it? What OS and browser?
  - ratww 6y ago
    iOS and macOS Safari. In iOS it's mostly when you have a lot of things open and too little memory. In macOS they don't reload (or maybe it's rare) but they do sleep. But it's very hard to notice.
novok 6y ago
Yeah browsers do to some point and probably can do more to improve the situation. One annoying thing about apple's aggressive approach although is it's difficult to have actual background processes running on your device. Stuff like arc app keeps on getting shut down, it's difficult to have a mail client or an image syncing service actually be running in the background as frequently as apple's first party ones and so on. Also you can't run something like little snitch on your mobile device. In the desktop case this is ok, since you have the escape hatch of electron apps in the web tech example, but in iOS you don't have anything.

drdaeman 6y ago

> Good behavior on an iOS device is not enforced by the app store, but by the OS. Unfortunately, both. It shouldn't happen, but in practice (on another OS, but I doubt there's a correlation between cognitive capabilities and preferred mobile device vendor, lol) people were installing those "brightest" flashlight apps mindlessly granting them every single permission they ask for. The machines can't yet analyze appropriateness of the request. That's where human moderation comes into play.