beware of task killers

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Jurg van Vliet

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Jan 27, 2010, 9:31:49 AM1/27/10

to Decaf Support

people,

we have been taking a good look at how we handle 'the background' in decaf. though we did most of the work last month already, we did find a couple of improvements. in the new release we don't use boot receiver anymore, no more decaf when restarting the phone. watching the instances will work fine. we could also optimize the watching of instances somewhat.

but, we have been testing with all sorts of flavours of task killers, to see when and how decaf appears. some task killers are too lethal, others are working as *we* would expect. the lethal ones remove the entire process, or deinstall as they call it themselves. it means that our alarms (necessary to wake us up to start checking on our instances) are gone.

ES Task Manager, is a lethal one. if you use that task killer just don't kill decaf and you are phone. (put it in the ignore list, so you don't have to resist the temptation:P) TaskKiller is fine. we tested the free version and killing decaf just removes the process from the stack. it does not change any other 'settings'.

google's statement is that android is designed for this behaviour, but some of these task killers 'abuse the api'. we have no idea how to guard us from that, because if you have decaf watch your instances you have trust it DOES watch them. when we find a solution we'll implement quickly, of course. suggestions are more than welcome...

groet,

jurg.

Jurg

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Jan 27, 2010, 9:45:24 AM1/27/10

to Decaf Support

for those interested in how android is planning to handle 'the' task
killer and processes in the future you can read this thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thread/thread/3f87972d1f99ee81