I considered for a long time buying a Jolla phone coming from the N9 but decided to wait out the successor and went instead the BB10 route. With the announcement of the tablet, I took the plunge and participated to the crowdfunding effort.

I have never used sailfish so I have no idea what are the multitasking capabilities of the current Sailfish OS in regards to Android.
Concerning BB10, native apps always work in the background whether or not you are on the home screen or in another app. A feature which is essential as I love to listen to videos played on the brother while using another app( whether native or android).

Now, this is not possible with android apps. Once you leave the app, it pauses.

So my question is the following: how does sailfish handles android apps in regards to multitasking? do they pause or do they keep working despite being out of the app?

I searched the forum for it but could not find the answer.

thanks in advance

It really depends on the Android apps. Most Android apps pause because Android is not a multitasking OS, and the apps expect to get killed by the Android OS anytime soon, while not active.

Basically Android apps on a Jolla behave like on an Android device. Very limited multitasking with Android. It's just not possible.

Some apps do great when multitasking. For example, I'm using the XBox Music Android app on my Jolla Phone to stream music from my cloud collection. The music keeps playing if I minimise it and even if open up other apps, it still keeps playing. It even pauses when there's a notification sound. Other than the interface, it feels very native to me this way. The OneDrive app also keeps syncing when multitasking, same goes for the OneNote app.

iOS pauses pretty much all Apps, then fast-switches to them. Its much more efficient (processing wise), and quite easy on the battery life.

When compared to Android, the iPhone tends to Multitask better/faster. That's because Apps are mostly sloppy written on Android (as opposed to iOS, WP). And that most Android phones are bloated and the bloated OS also has confusions during Multitasking.

That's my personal observations anyway.

I think Multitasking is a primary function, and the OS should be built from scratch with it, user interface, and developer tools in mind. That's the best recipe, bon appetite

My 2 cents on multitasking:

On any system when you go to console and type "ps -aux" if you see several lines of processes the system can multitask just fine.

I just tried the "top" command in a terminal emulator on my Note 3. Does this mean that Android can multitask?

Of course it can.

I don't get the 'Android can't multitask' thing either.

Typically I've got a couple of ConnectBot ssh terminal sessions open to my server, a browser or two, twitter and sometimes even a VNC session multi-tasking just fine on my Nexus 7. Usually they only stop running if Android runs out of RAM.

On an iPad some apps multitask fine also within limits. For instance Panic's Prompt SSH terminal app keeps sessions open AND running for 10 minutes before the OS shuts the app down.

IME Android is better than iOS but none are as deterministic as a proper multitasking OS like Sailfish.

Thank you. I just wanted it in writing and coming from someone else rather than me!

Cant we have some hack that when we minimize the app, that we do not let the app know it has been minimized.

Example use case:

How it looks like at the moment:
Official Android YouTube app > open a video/music > minimize > Video/Music stops

With some hack (to not let the app know you have minimized):
Official Android YouTube app > open a video/music > minimize > Video/Music does NOT stop


anyone?