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Don't buy phones from Samsung. They're the worst. They've been #1 on https://dontkillmyapp.com/ https://dontkillmyapp.com/ for a while now.

by dbrgn 5y ago

zibzab 5y ago
As someone who has been enjoying 3-5 day battery life, i am fine with Samsung killing background apps. And they have a system for whitelisting apps. Also, totally not relevant to the article.
saiya-jin 5y ago
There are around 1000 other factors in buying phones, mostly much more important to most users. I get it when ie developers are frustrated by inconsistent behavior across phones, but for example I prefer longer battery life compared to something that still runs in the background because I used it few hours ago.
- dbrgn 5y ago
  This is also about developer frustration, but not only. Over the years, I've used various alarm clock apps. There were some Huawei phones where it was literally impossible to get those alarm clock apps to work, because even if you added it to all whitelists, it would still kill the app in the background. Another issue is if you're using a messenger with VoIP functionality that you don't use every day. When an incoming call is received after not using the app for a while, it simply wouldn't ring. Stock Android already contains energy saving mechanisms that work reasonably well. By piling potentially broken additional battery saving mechanisms on top of that, you risk breaking the phone for certain use cases. At the very least, as a user of that phone, there should be an easy way to exclude certain apps from energy saving measures. (Let's pick out Huawei again, where even if you added an app to such exclusion lists, after a few days the OS would randomly remove the app from that exclusion list again. Plus, there was some kind of "lock" that you could activate in the app switcher, but that lock wouldn't survive a reboot.) Because some of the energy saving measures are so extreme, some manufacturers put popular apps on internal exclusion lists. These apps work fine, but apps by smaller developers don't. This is a major source of market distortion. Huawei used to be the worst offender in this space, but it has gotten a little bit better by now. Nokia also had a phase where they had a horribly broken energy saver, but thankfully they got rid of that. Samsung has gotten worse and worse over the last years.
aceazzameen 5y ago
Is there also a dontkillmybattery website listing poorly designed apps that leach my data and energy? Because it's very easy to whitelist the good ones on a Samsung device.
- dbrgn 5y ago
  See my reply to the sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30665186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30665186 I don't know about the current Samsung situation, but there were multiple phones by multiple vendors where whitelisting apps wasn't possible at all, or where it simply didn't work properly. As DontKillMyApp notes, "the latest feedback suggests even when you remove an app from the restricted list, Samsung may re-add them later after a firmware update or when it thinks it is using too much resources". That is horrible.

Don't buy phones from Samsung. They're the worst. They've been #1 on https://dontkillmyapp.com/ https://dontkillmyapp.com/ for a while now.

by dbrgn 5y ago

Don't buy phones from Samsung. They're the worst. They've been #1 on https://dontkillmyapp.com/ https://dontkillmyapp.com/ for a while now.

zibzab 5y ago

As someone who has been enjoying 3-5 day battery life, i am fine with Samsung killing background apps. And they have a system for whitelisting apps. Also, totally not relevant to the article.

saiya-jin 5y ago

There are around 1000 other factors in buying phones, mostly much more important to most users. I get it when ie developers are frustrated by inconsistent behavior across phones, but for example I prefer longer battery life compared to something that still runs in the background because I used it few hours ago.

dbrgn 5y ago
This is also about developer frustration, but not only. Over the years, I've used various alarm clock apps. There were some Huawei phones where it was literally impossible to get those alarm clock apps to work, because even if you added it to all whitelists, it would still kill the app in the background. Another issue is if you're using a messenger with VoIP functionality that you don't use every day. When an incoming call is received after not using the app for a while, it simply wouldn't ring. Stock Android already contains energy saving mechanisms that work reasonably well. By piling potentially broken additional battery saving mechanisms on top of that, you risk breaking the phone for certain use cases. At the very least, as a user of that phone, there should be an easy way to exclude certain apps from energy saving measures. (Let's pick out Huawei again, where even if you added an app to such exclusion lists, after a few days the OS would randomly remove the app from that exclusion list again. Plus, there was some kind of "lock" that you could activate in the app switcher, but that lock wouldn't survive a reboot.) Because some of the energy saving measures are so extreme, some manufacturers put popular apps on internal exclusion lists. These apps work fine, but apps by smaller developers don't. This is a major source of market distortion. Huawei used to be the worst offender in this space, but it has gotten a little bit better by now. Nokia also had a phase where they had a horribly broken energy saver, but thankfully they got rid of that. Samsung has gotten worse and worse over the last years.

aceazzameen 5y ago

Is there also a dontkillmybattery website listing poorly designed apps that leach my data and energy? Because it's very easy to whitelist the good ones on a Samsung device.

dbrgn 5y ago
See my reply to the sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30665186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30665186 I don't know about the current Samsung situation, but there were multiple phones by multiple vendors where whitelisting apps wasn't possible at all, or where it simply didn't work properly. As DontKillMyApp notes, "the latest feedback suggests even when you remove an app from the restricted list, Samsung may re-add them later after a firmware update or when it thinks it is using too much resources". That is horrible.