Hacker News Reader

Comment by fixermark | Hacker News Reader

Not most people though. There was a time when in MacOS, one could manually limit the amount of memory a program was launched into by setting the required and preferred memory footprint.

But that kind of low-level stuff isn't something most people care about or want to do. They just want the damn thing to work.

View on HN

That wasn't a feature, it was a bug. It's not that you could limit the amount of memory a program could use, you had to implement one contiguous block of memory an app could use and you had to close apps even when you had plenty of memory to get a contiguous block.

That was like Mac users who said that cooperative multitasking was better because it let games run more smoothly, while technically correct. It was like being happy that your dog pooped on your carpet because now you have free fertilizer.....

Furthermore, isn't the idea here to put the control into the user's hands?

Think of it as a resource manager controlled by you, but with the only interface that the general market will be able to use for something with a fair amount of technical nuance - ML.

I see your point that most people don't want to dig into the nitty-gritty details, but I don't think it'd hurt to be able to mark applications as High, Normal, or Low priority for memory and CPU use.

But this isn't really high/normal/low priority for mem and cpu, its how often the applications should wake up. And from my cursory understanding, background resource consumption can be highly variable, and most apps don't really need that much.

Its the same thing as using those battery manager task killer apps. For a pixel, those apps will result in worse battery life, because recent android versions manage resource consumption better than users will.

I don't want to micromanage things but there's definitely an app or two that I want to ban from running in the background...

Do you know what I would like? For Android to actually show what apps/services drain battery life.

I noticed recently that WhatsApp, Reddit Sync, and a few other apps were draining battery life like crazy. But none of that drainage was being shown in the battery stats.

Google is purposefully hiding how some apps use battery, and it started years ago when they allowed apps to hide under "Android OS" and "System" categories. In more recent versions they "fixed" this by simply not showing the Android OS and System categories in the battery stats anymore.

Google doesn't want to show how some apps use your battery because they drain the battery with similar methods that Google itself uses to drain your battery (by polling your location all the time, etc).

Noone is purposefully hiding anything. If you need advanced battery data, you can use Battery Historian even on non-modified phones and you'll get all the battery stats your heart desires, down to reason for each CPU wakeup.

https://developer.android.com/studio/profile/battery-histori...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com