alt Hacker NewsiOS has very strict process/resource management because it wants to preserve both available RAM (for responsiveness) and your battery life. I wouldn't call it cheating (even in jest); it's a very deliberately and carefully designed feature of the OS.
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eitland • 11/08/2024
And yet I can't get more than a full days use out of it if I use the phone to read news during my commute etc.
Sure, and that's fair, but to me the "cheating" is more about how it is limited to only certain types of computing. On a Mac, or indeed any non-Apple OS since Windows 3.1, you've been able to for instance, start a long-running, resource-intensive process like encoding a video, minimize that window, and open say, Minesweeper or read a text file for an hour, all knowing that the OS wouldn't dare interfere with your background task. In iOS you can be assured that the moment you background an app, iOS can and will send something to kill it at any minute, and there's not even a way to explicitly allow a certain app to be immune from being killed, even on a one-time basis.
All of this is totally by design (and thinking only of phone handsets I'm sure some people would defend this), but it is maybe the #1 thing that prevents this otherwise capable hardware from being used for more things. (Not to mention how much it hamstrings iPad OS).