by deeggo » Tue Oct 02, 2012 10:03 am
Some thoughts on Waze closing in the background.
Since a couple of weeks I changed my HTC DesireHD for a HTC One X. I found out fast that Waze closes more often in the background on my new device than on my old, although its specs are higher. That has been this way with the current market version and the last 3.4.99 betas. Switching from Waze to the gmail app and reading an e-mail can be enough to trigger this.
With closing in the background I mean that the Waze icon stays in the task bar, but when switching to it, Waze relaunches as if it wasn't running at all.
Apparently, the One X (or Android 4) memory management is more aggressive. I'm never using any task killers.
Here's some info on this subject, that was found during the development of Flitsnav, a Dutch GPS program that was experiencing exactly the same during development. I hope it can help you improve this behaviour, since several users are reporting this.
Waze closing in the background has to do with Android's Out Of Memory (OOM) management.
Some info on OOM_adj (-17 tot +15): The LOWER the value, the MORE important Android thinks the process is.
Foreground Application: -16 to 0
Visible Application: 1
Secondary Server: 2
Hidden Application: 3 to 7
Content Provider: 8 to 14
Empty Application: 15
Maybe you can adjust Waze, so that it sets is own OOM_adj to -17 and repeats that every 5 seconds for instance?