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Comment by thrashh | Hacker News Reader

I always thought that iPhones weren’t more efficient — they just dropped a major feature: running background apps.

I remember being able to run Ubuntu in the background on an unrooted Android phone while browsing the Internet. You can’t do that with iPhone.

That said, I rather have battery predictability over features, but I always thought that if Android dropped background apps, they would have the same battery usage as an iPhone.

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Both OS have a similar stance on background running processes - they kill them after a short delay. Iphones are more aggressive and consistent about it, and android OEMs sometimes give exceptions for their own bloatware.

For a long time Android was much more liberal in allowing job scheduling and it would allow apps to continue running permanently without restrictions.

Unfortunately trusting developers to use those allowances wisely did not pan out.

Do you know of a good web site explaining how this works? My Android phone used to kill my Jabber client all the time until I got to using Conversations which has a notification all the time which seems to be the way to avoid being killed while running in the background.

It would be nice to be able to reliably run background apps on Android.

Also as an aside Android doesn't appear to reliably kill background processes, it kills them if it thinks that something else needs the resources. Running the Facebook app is one way of triggering Android to kill a bunch of background apps.

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