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by pas 4037 days ago
The OS manages resources. It can temporarily grant (exclusive) control of a resource to an application. It can measure your other resource activity (touchscreen). If not touch screen activity for a long time, or when simply the screen is locked, then why is the camera on?

Sure, it can be a spy app, designed to listen and record! But then the OS can expose a per-app maximum wake setting. Yes, it'd look like a spreadsheet instead of a happy user UI, but that'd be a solution, instead of this "oh we can't do anything" excuse.
2 comments
sangnoir 4037 days ago
> If not touch screen activity for a long time, or when simply the screen is locked, then why is the camera on?

Because the OS shouldn't be making assumptions about applications' interaction models. People tend to write apps that OS creators never dreamed about. There are legitimate reasons for resource usage (camera) to continue without user interaction.From the top of my head, I can imagine writing a baby-monitor app that uses camera to stream video to my phone in the other room using wifi.

The resource-limiting heuristics have to be impossibly good, otherwise it gets in the way of useful apps.

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jordanthoms 4037 days ago
One way of handling this is to have a separate permission - Use camera, which allows an app to use it for a limited time with the user interacting and while in foreground, and a 'Background Camera' permission which your baby-monitor app would request. Perhaps make the permissions dialog for the background permission scarier so developers have an incentive to use the less privileged permission.

This would work nicely for GPS etc - sure, I want to be able to have My Tracks keep GPS on for 3 hours, but I don't need Uber to be able to do that - and their app has a nasty habit of forgetting to turn the GPS off if you leave it at the wrong time.

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kllrnohj 4036 days ago
> If not touch screen activity for a long time, or when simply the screen is locked, then why is the camera on?

Face unlock, dash cams, baby monitors, live-wallpapers-that-make-your-phone-look-transparent, security apps that snap a picture when someone fails to enter the correct unlock code and emails it to you, etc...

But replace camera with GPS and it's the same thing. Or audio. Or motion detectors. Or just really frequent alarms to poll a server (see IRC apps for an example)

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