I think there are two problems here, both of them psychological and a problem adapting from the desktop.
1) People equate a process existing with an application being "active". My recommended solution, in all APIs and OS screens that report "active applications" should only show/return applications that are consuming more than an idle amount of CPU, not just any application that has a PID. So a user running a shelves like application and it launches AsyncTasks to retrieve book cover jpgs. Then user hits home, immediately goes to their Task manager application, they see Shelves running consuming resources. Then the AsyncTasks finish, there are no more UI events driving more processing and voila Shelves disappears from the "running applications" list. Wow it "quit", user figures I don't need a task manager. 2) People associate, just like on the desktop, not wanting a function of an application to quitting the application. Earlier mort was suggesting the same thing. Twitter should have an "exit" button so that a user who wants it to temporarily stop fetching tweets can do so. This is wrong. If the user wants it to stop temporarily retrieving tweets there should be a button that says "disable background updates" in the application.. not an exit button. It's the insistence that these two need to be the same thing that's the problem for developers and adding "exit buttons". Solution is to have a Android Developers Blog post about why an "exit" button is wrong, and if you are including one what the best way to adapt your application to give users confidence in its background manners while not having an "exit" button. Maybe talk about when it's appropriate to terminate Threads or AsyncTasks as the application lifecycle changes. Should the app finish downloads that are only relevant to the active UI when the UI hides? What if the user is coming back in 2 seconds, what if not? When should they be interrupted and cancelled? I think this would be an excellent topic, certainly some advise I could use in my own applications. -Eric -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
