Apple to Allow Background Tasks on iPhone?

macrumors.com

4 pointspeter1234 comments

Can we please stop submitting rumors?

This article has no information. We can speculate endlessly about what Apple is going to release, but it's not very useful. Let's wait and see.

If this article is true, it really represents a mis-step or lack of focus for Apple. It's strange to see that in the wild like this.

On the other hand, getting the notification service right on the back end would likely have required a lot of effort and cost. It's not surprising so much that the service was never delivered, moreso that it was announced at all.

If background tasks are allowed to run in the future, I'd anticipate Bad Things for battery life, one of the strategic weak spots for the iPhone.

Hopefully they will cap processor utilization of background apps so they still work without sucking power.

My experience with a Blackberry was that background data (polling, tcp keepalives) were the worst of the battery draining. Unfortunately that kind of stuff would work better with a notification API.

At one time UNIXes were all about time sharing and quotas. I think bringing some of that back (certainly with different controls and interfaces) would be beneficial.

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