I thought Android could run multiple apps!?

[supremekizzle]

Ok, yes it can run multiple apps except for a certain 2 at the same time. Angry Birds and Rhapsody. I know these two are probably resource hungry and one is getting killed in favor of the other (Theory). Unless one of them is just unstable. The only way I can get the two to run simutaniously is to- open angry birds then quickly go back to rhapsody and hit play and go back and press the play button on angry birds with the speed of lightning. But if my song stops playing on rhapsody I have to go back and press play which means angry birds would have reset itself. How can I fix? Could I turn the compcache and vm heap size all the way up? Thanks for your help! P.s. I'm on RC5

 

[everrage2]

I don't think angry birds has support for multitasking yet

 

[Se7enLC]

Ok, yes it can run multiple apps except for a certain 2 at the same time. Angry Birds and Rhapsody. I know these two are probably resource hungry and one is getting killed in favor of the other (Theory). Unless one of them is just unstable. The only way I can get the two to run simutaniously is to- open angry birds then quickly go back to rhapsody and hit play and go back and press the play button on angry birds with the speed of lightning. But if my song stops playing on rhapsody I have to go back and press play which means angry birds would have reset itself. How can I fix? Could I turn the compcache and vm heap size all the way up? Thanks for your help! P.s. I'm on RC5

The Droid 1 is EXTREMELY limited on RAM. You *can* run two apps at the same time, but if either or both of them is a large app, Android will try to kick it out of ram any time it can. Unfortunately, Android seems to think that the gap between songs means that the music player is no longer needed, so it kicks it out.

Yes, compcache or a swap drive may help with the problem. You can also make sure that there aren't any unkillable apps running in the background that have a higher priority (services you're not using, etc).

 

[dmo580]

Angry Birds supports saved states. 256mb is not enough. However my iPod Touch works perfectly fine wiht Angry Birds and other games in saved states. Sigh Android RAM issues -.-

 

[Se7enLC]

Angry Birds supports saved states. 256mb is not enough. However my iPod Touch works perfectly fine wiht Angry Birds and other games in saved states. Sigh Android RAM issues -.-

Angry Birds works fine, because it's not doing anything when you switch away from it. But a music playing/streaming app is supposed to continue streaming. Saved-State won't cut it for that, especially if you are trying to play a huge game in the foreground.

It would be nice if developers could design their music apps with a client-server model. A very lightweight server that just handles the actual streaming/playing. It takes commands from the client, which is the bloated ad+feature filled GUI app that is the reason it takes up so much memory. A GUI can work fine with saved states - it's like a mime in a forest - if it's not in the foreground, who cares if it stops updating, so long as it updates when you come back to it.

Realistically, devices are getting more RAM, so there's no reason for developers to code for the corner-case that is the Droid, so apps will just get bigger and bigger and be less likely work work at all on the Droid, let alone work two-at-a-time.