Dianne Hackborn: Multitasking the Android Way

[Posted April 30, 2010 by ris]

Android developer Dianne Hackborn looks at how Android does multitasking. "A common misunderstanding about Android multitasking is the difference between a process and an application. In Android these are not tightly coupled entities: applications may seem present to the user without an actual process currently running the app; multiple applications may share processes, or one application may make use of multiple processes depending on its needs; the process(es) of an application may be kept around by Android even when that application is not actively doing something."

Dianne Hackborn: Multitasking the Android Way

Posted May 1, 2010 11:01 UTC (Sat) by emk (subscriber, #1128) [Link] (1 responses)

Thank you! That's a really interesting article on Android's process model. I picked up a Nexus One the other day, and I'm hoping to find a legitimate excuse to spend a day or two hacking around with it soon. :-) I wish the Android development process were a bit easier to follow (though I hear it's improving), but it's definitely a very nice phone.

Clarification

Posted May 1, 2010 11:18 UTC (Sat) by emk (subscriber, #1128) [Link]

To clarify, when I say, "I wish the Android development process were a bit easier to follow," I'm specifically speaking about the Android OS itself and Google's habit of large source drops. The application-level development model looks mostly reasonable, though I haven't actually tried anything beyond "Hello, world," quite yet.

OT: Great name

Posted May 1, 2010 15:25 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (5 responses)

Hackborn? I guess she was predestined to be a programmer. :)

OT: Great name

Posted May 3, 2010 12:23 UTC (Mon) by stumbles (guest, #8796) [Link] (4 responses)

Some people have all the cool names.

OT OT: Great name

Posted May 3, 2010 16:09 UTC (Mon) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link] (2 responses)

Some favorite recent names in NFL (American rules) football:

Ryan Longwell, kicker
Will Shields, offensive guard
Quentin Jammer, cornerback (breaks up pass plays)

I enjoy it when people have names that tie into their occupation. I'm bet somewhere there's an Officer Barker who works for a police dog unit.

OT OT: Great name

Posted May 3, 2010 20:21 UTC (Mon) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

It's hard to beat Karl Schwarzschild at justifying one's last name :-)

OT OT: Great name

Posted May 8, 2010 22:30 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I was friends with a Barker when I was young. Nowadays, she trains guide dogs for the blind...

OT: Great name

Posted May 8, 2010 10:40 UTC (Sat) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

Nominative determinism is a wonderful thing...

Dianne Hackborn: Multitasking the Android Way

Posted May 4, 2010 14:51 UTC (Tue) by pbaum (subscriber, #4514) [Link] (2 responses)

Interesting article, but I still don't understand why using "a form of swap space" is better than just using good old swap.
If you can save the states of the programs you can also create a swap file and use it, right?

Dianne Hackborn: Multitasking the Android Way

Posted May 4, 2010 19:07 UTC (Tue) by emk (subscriber, #1128) [Link]

The saved program states in Android, as I understand them, are tinymore analogous to URL parameters than a complete swap file.

Android's ability to transparent quit and relaunch programs is quite nice (at least on the N1), and it's frustrating when certain programs don't support it correctly.

Dianne Hackborn: Multitasking the Android Way

Posted May 5, 2010 9:25 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Suppose you have a spreadsheet document open. There are two ways to move the document to disk:
- File->Save, Close.
- Do nothing yourself and let the system swap it out

Both options regain RAM. Yet they are quite different. I guess this is more or less this difference Android is interested in.

Dianne Hackborn: Multitasking the Android Way

Posted May 5, 2010 18:56 UTC (Wed) by rich0 (guest, #55509) [Link]

It would be really nice if android gave end-users better ways to manage poorly-behaved apps.

It would be really nice to have a place in the settings menu where I can tell android not to let ReallyCoolApp launch a service.

The android model seems to be that it is up to apps to behave themselves most of the time, and that doesn't always work.

The problem is that just about every app that is communication-related wants to have some kind of a push-sync feature, and it is often hard to turn them off. I love Google Voice. I'd love to have it launch a service every 30 minutes to see if I have new messages and then die. I don't need it to consume resources during those other 29 minutes, and it is very hard to prevent.

As a result, everybody and their uncle resorts to "task manager" apps, whose single purpose is to break the whole paradigm that Google built. Now, app writers hate these programs, and perhaps rightly so. However, people wouldn't use them if android really did do a good job of guessing what end users do and don't want in RAM.