Isn't that the same kind of excuse-making you're dinging the Android world for? "OK, fine, the experience sucks by default but it works fine if you just do this and this and this". Android has all those sorts of features too.
It's just a hard problem. App developers are bad, and do bad things. OSes can't protect against all bad behavior. Phone manufacturers do have a vested interest in protecting their users from bad apps. Users do actually benefit from this on balance.
Users don't benefit from lazy ham-fisted hacks. There is no benefit to killing an app without notifying it in any way, or killing a background app that is using 0.2% of available memory and 0.0% of CPU just because it has been open for a long time.
> There is no benefit to killing an app without notifying it in any way
Sigh. There can be on balance. Bad apps get killed, users don't see as many dead phones. A few false positives get killed too, to great annoyance of their authors (and potentially users, but it's mostly the app authors upset here, be honest).
Whether that's worth it or not depends on the numbers involved, not your personal definition for "ham-fisted" or the existence of a better solution.
All I'm saying is that app vendors aren't the only parties involved here, and that the problem being addressed is real, and quite important.
Can you explain the advantage in killing the app without notifying it? You're going to kill the app because it's consuming 500MB of memory, fine, send it SIGTERM or equivalent and then give it two minutes to orderly shut down before you send SIGKILL. Not doing it that way has a cost and no apparent benefit to "balance" it with.
> Can you explain the advantage in killing the app without notifying it?
Um.. "The app uses less energy." Is that a serious question?
Again you seem to be arguing that there are better ways to solve this problem. There no doubt are. That doesn't mean the existing solution doesn't have value.
> Um.. "The app uses less energy." Is that a serious question?
For the two minutes between when you ask it to shut down and when you kill it? Even assuming that's a meaningful amount of energy savings (probably not), you could just kill it at the same time as you would have regardless but ask it to shut down two minutes before that.
> Again you seem to be arguing that there are better ways to solve this problem. There no doubt are. That doesn't mean the existing solution doesn't have value.
All value is relative. You can make anything sound good by comparing it to something arbitrarily worse, but that doesn't prove anything. Riding a donkey is better than walking on foot but I wouldn't want to have to travel from New York to LA on one.
The question is whether it's better than the good known existing alternatives, not whether it's better than the bad ones.
It's just a hard problem. App developers are bad, and do bad things. OSes can't protect against all bad behavior. Phone manufacturers do have a vested interest in protecting their users from bad apps. Users do actually benefit from this on balance.