Droid does not prioritize phone app above others

[slinky]

I discovered something very disturbing tonight. When the phone rings on a Blackberry, the phone has complete priority. On my iPhone, I never missed a call due to some other app doing something. On the Droid, the phone app is as vulnerable and will generate pop ups to force quit.

I missed 2 calls today due to major lag for an application that was supposedly "closed." I took a few pictures about an hour before a call came in. Checked mail and did something else afterwards. Somehow the phone wouldn't answer despite my numerous swipe attempts. Finally after I lost the call I got the force quit/wait dialog box. I waited, then quit and the phone went into the camera mode, making flickering noises to get its way in there as it usually does.

Anyways, I wonder if there is a memory leak of some sort in 2.1. I'm getting more home screen missing icon issues than before. The only thing left is to wipe the entire phone and SD card and see if that helps. I have nothing other than system stuff running except for a search app - aurora. I even turned off mylock.

Regardless of whether the growing lag has an issue with hardware (doubtful) or software (not likely) or corruption in the phone or SD card (possible but not likely), what really concerns me is that lack of priority given to the phone application.

 

[Corinacakes]

i have no idea what you're talking about but here's a :bump: for you just in case someone else does. good luck

 

[akstyle450]

i have too noticed this on occasions, alot of times, the phone screen doesnt come on when a phone call arrives and the phone just vibrates/rings, then eventually it comes on but its too late =/
i have found that not using a live wallpaper greatly decreases lag in the phone
hopefully this stuff could be fixed in a future update =D

 

[brando56894]

I havent experienced these problems yet, and hopefully I never will. I have a memory manager app (memory usage plus) on my phone that gives me a GUI view of the top command that displays processes and my phone app is running at the priority of 100 (the top priority).

I believe that app is a paid app and I was just looking for an easy way to display the priority of a process in the terminal but I cant find anything (top and ps dont display the priority). I'd suggest that you check to see if your phone app is at 100 in case it got re-nice'd some how.

 

[slinky]

i have no idea what you're talking about but here's a :bump: for you just in case someone else does. good luck

On the Blackberry, if the phone rings it doesn't matter what any other app does or is doing, e.g. crashing. The phone application is always available to pick up a call asap and suspend what you were doing to enable you to pick up a call asap. I don't remember missing a call with the Blackberry or iPhone, perhaps the rare glitch once in a blue moon.

What I've noticed is that the Droid gets stuck in the process of picking up a call. What is disturbing is that this can happen not only when you are using another app but also if you've had other apps open (that were not quit by a "useless" task manager) and cause all sorts of delays in your ability to answer the phone. I've had everything from a delay in seeing the "swipe" screen to seeing the swipe screen that is frozen to seeing the phone application put up a "do you want to force quit" dialog box.

 

[Darkseider]

Sounds to me like you have downloaded something that isn't playing quite nice. Assuming it is not rooted if you could list the applications that you have downloaded it would be appreciated. It will help us to try and troubleshoot the issue with you. Personally I have never had an issue like this with my phone and I have been rooted since day one. Hell I rarely if ever see a FC anymore.

 

[Big Cam]

I have yet to experience anything like this.

No matter what I'm doing, everything stops and the callerid shows up at the latest after one short vibrate.

 

[Mule65]

Sounds to me like you have downloaded something that isn't playing quite nice.

The phone should work no matter what you download.

 

[Darkseider]

Sounds to me like you have downloaded something that isn't playing quite nice.

The phone should work no matter what you download.

That, unfortunately, is not true. If an app was downloaded that is written poorly and is running amok eating up CPU cycles and memory then the phone will perform poorly. Simply put even though the phone has the highest priority if there is a process that is running wild and clicking through CPU cycles and slamming the memory regardless of what priority another app has it will take a longer time to initiate. This is true of any modern OS regardless of its' lineage. The OS will handle it and kill the offending app/process gracefully without killing the OS itself but that takes time. That time is the lost time and this is why he is seeing a delay.

 

[Mule65]

Sounds to me like you have downloaded something that isn't playing quite nice.

The phone should work no matter what you download.

That, unfortunately, is not true.

... and that is unacceptable, IMHO.

 

[Darkseider]

The phone should work no matter what you download.

That, unfortunately, is not true.

... and that is unacceptable, IMHO.

Welcome to a TRUE multi-tasking OS. 99.99% of the time this will never be an issue for anyone. Unfortunately there may come a time when an app that is downloaded is written like crap and goes whacky. It happens in Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, etc... Now it won't happen on a BB or an iPhone because they are mutli-tasking OSes. Also note that the BB runs a very basic OS as compared to Android. The iPhone OS although advanced is crippled by Apple. If you were to speak to folks that have actually jailbroken their iPhones and multi-task you will see that some have similar problems as well.

So before you say it is unacceptable try to understand the underlying technologies and operating systems at play.

 

[slinky]

Well the app that was "written like crap" might have been Android's own Camera app. The last app I used was the camera and after I had a problem answering the phone and force quit, the phone went right into the Camera app.

I looked at what apps are running in the background on my phone. I have:

GTalkService
VoiceSearch (two times different amuonts)
Android Keyboard
Google Voice
Update Service
Android Agenda Widget
RingGuardService

That's it. What also concerns me is that there are frequently times when there is lag before I can answer the phone. I used an app called Speech Alert which announces the name and/or the number of the caller. Unfortunately it always stutters and isn't quite clear. I've turned it off but there are still occasional lags.

I don't know exactly how Android works under the hood. If the BB is more primitive but ensures that I answer the call each time, I'll stick with primitive. Just a thought based upon my current observation and figured it would be a good topic to discuss with my fellow Droid owners. Hope to get maximum reliability with the phone portion.

 

[Darkseider]

Well the quickest way to troubleshoot this is to do a factory reset. This will bring the phone basically back to a default status. Wipes pretty much everything and ensure that it is as close to a virgin state as possible. If after doing this you still experience these problems the answer is that the hardware is flaky.

 

[slinky]

Well the quickest way to troubleshoot this is to do a factory reset. This will bring the phone basically back to a default status. Wipes pretty much everything and ensure that it is as close to a virgin state as possible. If after doing this you still experience these problems the answer is that the hardware is flaky.

That isn't quick at all, unfortunately. Android provides no simple way of restoring apps and data onto your phone reliably. Doing a factory reset means investing several hours in having your apps, data, contacts/sync and organization of apps on your phone appear the way it should. The backup I have used hasn't been 100% reliable for restores after my testing. I'll take wired sync to my desktop PC any day over the spotty cloud backup. When the Blackberry Dakota comes out, I'm sure many will give it some serious consideration. At this point I have no choice except to try - but it seems I'm not the only one with this particular issue so I wonder if it really is just data corruption.

 

[Mule65]

That, unfortunately, is not true.

... and that is unacceptable, IMHO.

Welcome to a TRUE multi-tasking OS. 99.99% of the time this will never be an issue for anyone. Unfortunately there may come a time when an app that is downloaded is written like crap and goes whacky. It happens in Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, etc... Now it won't happen on a BB or an iPhone because they are mutli-tasking OSes. Also note that the BB runs a very basic OS as compared to Android. The iPhone OS although advanced is crippled by Apple. If you were to speak to folks that have actually jailbroken their iPhones and multi-task you will see that some have similar problems as well.

So before you say it is unacceptable try to understand the underlying technologies and operating systems at play.

Blah blah blah. Add a dedicated phone processor. It's unacceptable. It's gone.