iPhone vs Android

Rikki Cattermole via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Mon Sep 12 16:19:11 PDT 2016


On Monday, 12 September 2016 at 22:57:23 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> An interesting article written for laypeople: 
> http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/12/12886058/iphone-7-specs-competition
>
> One quote that may be of relevance to us: "As to the iPhone’s 
> memory, this is more of a philosophical distinction between 
> Apple and Google. The former is neurotic about killing 
> background processes and dumping background apps from memory in 
> iOS, whereas the latter is more liberal with app management in 
> Android (though Google is gradually moving toward the Apple way 
> of doing things). The upshot is that an iPhone can feel super 
> smooth and responsive with half the RAM of an Android device. 
> RAM consumes power, so having less of it is another factor 
> contributing to the iPhone’s efficiency lead."
>
> This may be interpreted as follows: the iPhone uses native apps 
> with reference counting whereas the Android uses a virtual 
> machine with tracing garbage collection. It follows that the 
> latter needs more memory for the same performance, and is more 
> jerky in behavior than the former. Wondering to what extent 
> this is true. If it is, that provides more impetus for 
> reference counting for D by the following logic: (a) it is 
> likely that in the future more code will run on portable, 
> battery-powered systems; (b) battery power does not follow a 
> Moore trajectory, so at this point in history demand for 
> battery lifetime is elastic.
>
>
> Andrei

I would interpret it quite differently to this.
On iOS applications that are not currently in the foreground or 
are a service get killed unconditionally.
On Android applications keep running even when they are no longer 
foreground but instead get 'paused'. Here is a handy little graph 
of the different events an Android app can be in[0]. Note the 
difference between onPause and onStop.

[0] 
https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html#ActivityLifecycle


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