Client Developer Experience

Complete the high priority background service implementations

Bug #1532221 reported by Michael Zanetti on 2016-01-08

248

This bug affects 52 people

	Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
Canonical System Image	Confirmed	Critical	Pat McGowan	Canonical System Image backlog
Client Developer Experience	Confirmed	Undecided	Unassigned
ubuntu-application-lifecycle	In Progress	Critical	Thomas Voß

Bug Description

It frequently happens that people would want to implement applications but then give up again because their ideas can't be realized because of the current *very* limited implementation of the app lifecycle management. If one is listening around in the community, the sentence "I wanted to create that, but can't because of lifecycle" is part of the daily routine by now. Also I have heard several customers saying that they have flashed Android on their BQ devices because they couldn't be bothered any more to keep the display on to load a website, listen to some video's music, send a picture over telegram and much much more. Lately I explained to Pebble.com why RockWork (https://launchpad.net/rockwork) can't be published in the official Ubuntu store, their answer was: "In a world where Apple and Google had such policies, Pebble would not exist." IMO it's really about time that we put some priority on this issue. I am not saying we should just throw away the current approach, but if we stick to it, we really need to get going with providing the promised system services.

Tags:

Revision history for this message

Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan) wrote on 2016-01-08:

We recently kicked off a discussion on priorities and work will be happening soon, and will loop in mzanetti and community

Revision history for this message

Andrea Bernabei (faenil) wrote on 2016-01-08:

can't agree more, we have to act on this ASAP

Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan) on 2016-01-08

Changed in canonical-devices-system-image:
status:	New → Confirmed
assignee:	nobody → Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)

Revision history for this message

Marcin Baszczewski (baszczewski) wrote on 2016-01-21:

This is most important bug in Ubuntu Phone until now. We need have opportunity to create:
1) own services;
2) apps that can work in background;

Plese consider ideas from Android here.

Revision history for this message

Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan) wrote on 2016-05-19:

@thomas can we finish the plan writeup for background services

Changed in canonical-developer-experience:
assignee:	nobody → Thomas Voß (thomas-voss)
importance:	Undecided → Critical
status:	New → Confirmed
Changed in canonical-devices-system-image:
importance:	Undecided → Critical
milestone:	none → backlog

Revision history for this message

Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan) wrote on 2016-05-19:

I am changing the title as I do not agree its the approach, its that the service implementations are incomplete
Hopefully we can outline a prioritized plan to address this and gain some contributions.

summary:

- lifecycle management approach badly impacts evolution of the app
- ecosystem
+ Complete the high priority background service implementations

Thomas Voß (thomas-voss) on 2016-05-20

Changed in canonical-developer-experience:
status:	Confirmed → In Progress
Changed in ubuntu-application-lifecycle:
assignee:	nobody → Thomas Voß (thomas-voss)
importance:	Undecided → Critical
status:	New → In Progress

Victor gonzalez (victor-gonzalez-0) on 2016-06-08

tags:

added: bq-feedback

Revision history for this message

Richard Somlói (ricsipontaz) wrote on 2016-07-28:

Any update on this? For me this is the only missing feature in Ubuntu Touch. :)

Zoltan Balogh (bzoltan) on 2016-08-24

no longer affects:

canonical-developer-experience

Zoltan Balogh (bzoltan) on 2016-08-24

Changed in canonical-developer-experience:
status:	New → Invalid
status:	Invalid → Confirmed

Revision history for this message

John M. (jhnmlkvch9) wrote on 2016-09-29:

It is not clear to me what this bugfix will actually allow. Does this mean background processes will be allowed to run on Ubuntu Touch? Last I checked @tvoss was quite against this idea. Has he relented? Can someone clarify?

Revision history for this message

Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan) wrote on 2016-10-03:

This bug is about providing system level services and apis to cover the use cases, not allow random background services.

Revision history for this message

Stunts (f-pinamartins) wrote on 2016-10-03:

Some time ago, in the mailing list circulated a google doc with a proposal for a plugin system for account-polld.
I think it might be relevant to link it here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o-y3dUOm8voAzhZCpbPSg-zhRBweYHXn8voQDprZtsc/edit#heading=h.mkp949ntqaq5

In short, the proposal attempts to solve the account-polld use case by adding a plugin API that external applications can access. Some devs have made some comments on this document and overall seem to have a positive reaction to it, however, the last comments are from August 2016.
So my question is - is there any chance we might see this plugins API implemented in Ubuntu touch? Or was this idea abandoned in favour of a better one?
Apologies if this is not the correct place to ask this, but it seems adequate and on topic after reading the bug description and the comments.

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