Couple of things I can see; - Isn't this new scenario going to have a negative impact on battery life because apps won't be able to turn GPS off when they don't need to use it.
- Isn't the biggest privacy problem at the moment with permission granularity on Internet access?, There are many apps that want internet access just to access a donations page, but as a user of, say, an accounts program, how can I tell that is all the app wants to do and that it isn't also sending my bank and credit card details somewhere? Al. --- * Written an Android App? - List it at http://andappstore.com/ * ====== Funky Android Limited is registered in England & Wales with the company number 6741909. The registered head office is Kemp House, 152-160 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX, UK. The views expressed in this email are those of the author and not necessarily those of Funky Android Limited, it's associates, or it's subsidiaries. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jean-Baptiste Queru Sent: 24 April 2009 16:35 To: [email protected] Subject: [android-developers] Re: Android v. 1.5 = FAIL #2: Directly Manipulating Settings All right, here's the deal: One of the reasons that motivated the change is battery life, which is a major point of frustration for many Android users. More precisely, we've noticed in our testing that there was a strong correlation between user complaints about battery life and specific applications being installed, and a deeper investigation showed that those apps were indeed causing poor battery life by turning hardware on in a way that users weren't expecting. Restricting access to those settings through an explicit UI was found to be an appropriate mechanism for users to known precisely enough what was going on and to get appropriate expectations about battery life. Another reason that motivated the change is an overall concern about privacy and abuse. There've been concerns that changing settings like GPS, data roaming, wifi, airplane mode without the user's explicit action for each operation was inappropriate. Both of those areas were broadly reported by users, by carriers, and in the press. 1.5 addresses those concerns based on the feedback that we're received, by putting the user in better control of their phone. JBQ On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 7:19 AM, chrispix <[email protected]> wrote: > > While I read the blog here : > http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/04/future-proofing-your-ap > ps.html I almost had a heart attack. Having a location based > application, the number one issue we had was being able to > automatically turn on / off GPS based on an application setting. Which > quite frankly makes some sense. > > Having to prompt the user each time to turn on / off gps is a giant > pain from the standpoint of program flow. > > I have used our applications setting to actually turn GPS off, because > it was faster to open our app and close the app, and turn off GPS. > Rather than opening the settings, and doing it that way. > > I hope you have updated the market so we can respond to all the > negative feedback regarding having to manually enable GPS/disable GPS. > > The coding change is not the matter. The fact that a useful function > was taken away. Can't there be some way to code GPS state to an > application state? > > > -- Jean-Baptiste M. "JBQ" Queru Android Engineer, Google. Questions sent directly to me that have no reason for being private will likely get ignored or forwarded to a public forum with no further warning. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
