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urbandroid-team / dont-kill-my-app

Android vendors, don't kill my app!
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Killing your app is just collateral damage #33

Open lwmv opened 5 years ago

lwmv commented 5 years ago

It's no surprise Chinese phone vendors top the shit list (2nd-5th). China has very bad Android ecology. As Google Play Store is blocked in China, Android users and developers don't have a universal and controlled app store to fetch and deliver apps. Instead, every phone vendor build their own app store and their policy differs greatly with each other. The result is a state of utter chaos. For example, Google requires all new app on Play Store to target API 26, but no Chinese app store has this requirement. So users in China will always get the benefit of new API much later than users out of China. What is worse, lack of constraint results in all developers trying to get their app alive in the background so they can push ads to the users whenever they want. This is not a matter of simply consuming more battery, all these apps will compete for more RAM and CPU, soon my phone will become lagged and lose response like a brick. A brickphone is more useless than a dumbphone. You say "Naturally users blame developers for their apps failing to deliver". This is true. But what is more naturally in China is that users blame phone vendors when their phone lose reponse because of these heavily resource consuming apps. So Chinese phone vendors have to take strict policy to control background behaviours. Any vendor who don't have strict background constraint will lose their market share. This results in the collateral damage to the apps that are not so heavily resource consuming and just do their expected jobs quietly in the background. This is just a weighting of cons and pros, and the market has made its choice. This is, most users want phones with strict background control policy. From a user's perspective, we must presume that all apps are evil. This is just what the phone vendors did. They strictly restrict the background behaviour of all third-party apps by default, while give users the option to whitelist certain apps. If developers try to workaround the restrictions, the phone vendors will update their system to cripple these workarounds. I think what the developers should do is teaching their users how to whitelist their apps, instead of trying to workaround the restrictions.

Mikaela commented 5 years ago

I just wanted to say that the top 1, Nokia (or HMD Global) is actually Finnish :smile:

yccheok commented 5 years ago

@lwmv

I totally understand where you're coming from.

Based on the Internet population, there are 2 Internet worlds - China, and rest of the world.

What current vendors doing now, will "solve" the chaos in China Android ecosystem. From what I can see from the reaction of China developers and end users, they're pretty happy with such arrangements. For such vendor behavior, it is doing more good than harm. More bad guys are killed, than good guys.

But, for rest of the world, such vendor behavior is doing more harm than good. For instance, AlarmManager is the only official way to setup scheduled alarm. Now, it is broken.

In fact, all legit alarm related apps in Google Play store are broken! More good guys are killed, than bad guys.

Google needs to step in, to resolve the problem faced by "rest of the world".