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0 pointsizacus4y ago0 comments

> Oh, so because of (some) dumb users let's punish everyone by making them subject to a monopoly lock-in. Great reasoning.

In your reasoning, "most" users would be done and "most" apps would be malicious.

But in the end, it's quite simple - dealing with power use on mobile is hard and most developers don't care (same as they don't give a crap about making your web pages fast and slim). Users care about battery life above most of other features, including your freedom. They WILL got and buy a device that lasts the longer amount of time in the smallest and lightest package.

As long as these two things are true, leaving developers to run their polling code without restrictions has a massive effect on sales of both OEM devices and Android ecosystem as a whole. As such, OEMs are actively modifying Android to not allow this - see the wonderfully depressing https://dontkillmyapp.com/ - which is a significantly worse mess than you having to use a proprietary service to send a single device wakeup ping.

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Andrew_nenakhov4y ago

If users care about battery life, give them tools to analyse what's eating it, but handcuff it so they don't hurt themselves. That way users who care about freedom will have it, and users who care about battery life above all will just block the permission to run in the background.

But that doesn't align with Google's interests, so it will never happen, unless they are forced to.

dtech4y ago

You severely overestimate what the user will do. Android has these tools built-in, but they are hardly used.

It's similar to how crappy drivers causing BSODs were for a large part responsible for the "Windows is a crappy unstable mess" sentiment of the late 90's and 00's [1]. This led to Microsoft severely restricting driver manufacturers, requiring signing and WHQL etc. Less freedom but stability and perception among users has markedly improved.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-the-blue-screen-of-death-n...

Andrew_nenakhov4y ago

Users are perfectly capable of using battery stats and determine which apps consume too much power, and then make an informed decision. This is not some rocket science.

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0 pointsizacus4y ago0 comments

> Oh, so because of (some) dumb users let's punish everyone by making them subject to a monopoly lock-in. Great reasoning.

In your reasoning, "most" users would be done and "most" apps would be malicious.

0 comments

Andrew_nenakhov4y ago

But that doesn't align with Google's interests, so it will never happen, unless they are forced to.

dtech4y ago

You severely overestimate what the user will do. Android has these tools built-in, but they are hardly used.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-the-blue-screen-of-death-n...

Andrew_nenakhov4y ago

Users are perfectly capable of using battery stats and determine which apps consume too much power, and then make an informed decision. This is not some rocket science.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse