Android: "If you force stop an app, it may misbehave"

…is about the stupidest warning message ever. The only time I ever force stop an app is when it is already misbehaving and I want to stop it and reload and start over. How could it misbehave any worse by force stopping it?

As a software developer, I understand that you want to have some kind of a confirmation message before continuing, but this one is just makes no sense to me.

Huh. My Android phone says “Force stopping may cause errors” which is true; other apps may potentially rely on the app in question being stopped.

Oh, behave!

That’s better than the warnings we get on our business software. All it is is incomprehensible text strings and ambiguous phrases. I suspect the software folk who wrote it were, shall we say, not in the top half of their graduating classes.

I used to be a software developer who wrote the error messages (and help texts) of my programs sometimes myself, and I know how hard it is to bridge the gap between the POV of the developer and that of the end user. I did my best and hope that the end users could work with my messages and texts. I don’t want to brag, but I think that for a typical developer and engineer my writing skills are relatively good, but I may be totally wrong. Then, having worked with computers for over thirty years, I’ve yet to encounter a program/OS/app with messages that have any real use for the end user.

The other side of the coin may be if non-IT-specialists like editors are responsible for the error/warning messages. Those texts may be perfect in grammar and syntax, but incomprehensible in a technical way because the writers didn’t comprehend the technical aspects themselves.

Android apps have a complex lifecycle with messages telling them when they transition from one phase to another. Many apps will utilize this to signal when they should squirrel their current state so that when they are next started they can recover to where they left off. In principle an app which is forced off without being allowed to do this may start up in an inconsistent state.

This is interesting. I work with a lot of high tech tools. Oftentimes, when I’m working on a tool I’m not too familiar with, I try to put myself into the minds of the engineers that designed the tool to give me a better intuitive understanding of how the tool is supposed to be operated. (I sometimes jokingly tell myself: Stop thinking like a normal person, and think like an engineer.)

It never occurred to me that the guys on the other end are trying to think like me. Lol.

But we have to if we develop something for a mass market. The product/program can be the technically most sophisticated piece, but if the interface is too complicated/unintuitive for the average user, it’s a failure. I wrote programs for a mass market as well as for very specialized and small circle of clients, sometimes for individual clients, and the challenges for the user interfaces and messages are very different in both instances, especially if the users will also be technicians/engineers instead of average everyday users.

Error messages need to provide two things (there could be more, but need these two):

  • true information about what happened

  • sensible advice about how to handle it
    I think the message in question actually passes this little test, but it does so while saying as little as possible, making it cryptic and exasperating.

Do they avoid saying more because a better message makes more people ask questions?

Yep, my version of Android uses the “misbehave” message. I think it’s cute. In some instances, it actually makes sense… Say, for example, you force quit a news app that has a widget running on one of your screens. The widget will likely refuse to update after a force quit, even after you restart the app; you have to remove the widget completely and replace it to fix the problem.

I always tell it to don’t misbehave in my best Antonio Banderes accent.

I’ve always assumed they’re telling you not that it’ll misbehave, but that other things might.That is, if you force stop an app, other apps that rely on it may/will not work properly.

The pop up message that I get that always bugs me is when I open something (document, picture etc) and it tells me that I’m using the default application to open it. I’d understand if it told me that I wasn’t using the default app or that I just changed the default app, but I’m not sure why it feels the need to let me know that it’s opening it with my ‘preferred’ app.

Hodie Natus Est Radici Frater

Is there a way to stop Android apps other than by force? When I’m done using something, I like to turn it off. One thing that drove me nuts when I got my smartphone, and still does, really, was that none of the apps seem to have a button or a control within them that means “I’m done using you for now, go away”. The only way I’ve found to turn them off is to hit the recent apps button, and shut them down there (and I’m not entirely sure that really kills them). So far, it works, but it feels rather like shutting down Windows programs with the Task Manager, rather than with the program’s native shutdown or exit command.

I’ve never used an iPhone, but my experience with other Apple devices makes me suspect they’re no better.

Yes, but it’s exactly what you are doing. That is the equivalent of asking them to quit. If an app is really hung, you have to either reboot or use an actual task manager app.

You’re not expected to close Android apps. Apps when not in use go to sleep in memory, and then are closed when more you need their memory for another app. A properly designed app will save your place, and then come back when you run it again. Asking it to quit (from recent apps) will cause such an app to reset your place when it loads again.

When you’re finished with an app, they just expect you to go back to the home screen.