Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 1st May 2010 18:52 UTC, submitted by kragil
"Android is fairly unique in the ways it allows multiple applications to run at the same time. Developers coming from a different platform may find the way it operates surprising. Understanding its behavior is important for designing applications that will work well and integrate seamlessly with the rest of the Android platform. This article covers the reasons for Android's multitasking design, its impact on how applications work, and how you can best take advantage of Android's unique features."
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Member since:
2006-01-25
Nice and verz informative article. I actually believe the need for multitasking as we know it now should be completely eradicated. When you think about it, opening applications is just a crutch designed to obfuscate memory limitation of today's PC architecture. Apps are really just an abstraction, interfaces between user and data. Ideally, user shouldn't even worry about opening an app to be able to work with data. We can get there in the future when there is no difference between short term (RAM) and long term (HDD) memory.
I think that's where Apple (and others, of course) is headed with state-saving on iPhone and dock in OSX, which further diminishes the indication of running/not running applications with each release.