Background apps are killed while in use, on the phone.

[James Lewis]

A fairly common experience:-

I start listening to a podcast on the phone, and then browse Google Plus... but after a few minutes the phone kills Podbird (to recover resources?), this is irritating, since I was using that background app...

I then switch back to the application screen to re-load podbird and restart playback, then switch back to Google+, but it has killed the Google+ app and I have lost my place.

A similar thing happens if one is browsing Google Plus, sees an article that's interesting, click on the article to read it before replying, then switch back to Google Plus to respond... but Google Plus has already been closed...

There needs to be some way for apps to remain running in the background while in use without being killed....

[Gerry Boland (gerboland)]

Hi James,
what device are you referring to? Bq?
Processes are killed when resources run low. We still need to improve our background process system however.
-G

[James Lewis (james-fsck)]

Gerry, thanks for the comment!

I thought perhaps it would be better on the MX4, but its really not... I understand the idea of killing apps when resources are low, but listening to a podcast while browsing google plus will resilt in podbird being killed within a few minutes.

I would suggest a couple of things,

a) Apps need a way to tell the system that they are doing background processing, the music player and apps like podbird should be able to set a flag so they are not killed while playing audio or updating/downloading

b) There needs to be a time delay, so that if a user is flipping between apps to cut/paste or research a posting/email the apps they are using dont get killed..... Ive lost emails and social media postings because i looked at wikipedia to check a fact.. I would say 10-15 mins would be required.

[James Lewis (james-fsck)]

It seems people are reporting this issue against podbird:-

https://bugs.launchpad.net/podbird/+bug/1449719

[Nekhelesh Ramananthan (nik90)]

This is indeed affecting Podbird (podcast app) users very much. Here is the conversation I had with Jim Hodapp about this,

<nik90> jhodapp: hey, I just noticed that when podbird is running in the background playing a online stream, if you open a number of apps such that you hit the memory limit where podbird is killed by the system, the playback also stops..Shouldn't media-hub prevent that?
<jhodapp> nik90, nope, when the client application goes away so does the media-hub playback session
* dbarth (~<email address hidden>) has joined #ubuntu-touch
<jhodapp> nik90, we may do what you said in the future after we get some additional lifecycle additions into UT
<nik90> jhodapp: hmm..so there is never a way to ensure that the playback continues regardless of the state of the system.
<tenleftfingers> nik90: I've noticed that problem. Playback will eventually stop when PodBird is in the background. Also, it doesn't resume playback from the right place (and sometimes it starts from the beginning again): https://bugs.launchpad.net/podbird/+bug/1449719
<ubot5> Ubuntu bug 1449719 in podbird "Podbird stops playing after a few minutes when not in the foreground" [Critical,Confirmed]
<jhodapp> nik90, not at present, no

[James Lewis (james-fsck)]

I know there are priorities, but i cant highlight this issue enough..... with an MX4 on my commute i listen to podcasts and browse google+, some days i can spend 5-10 minutes of my journey restarting podbird so i cant imagine how bad this is on the bq device with half the ram.

[Rick Timmis (rick-timmis)]

I can confirm I have experienced this issue when switching between apps, and not just Podbird to G+ although I have seen that and the other G+ issue James alluded to above.

It generates a really frustrating user experience, which I think almost all users would be unhappy with :=(

I have the BQ 4.5 Aquarius.