

Loopt Sneaks Background Multitasking Into Its iPhone App - DarrenMills
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/loopt-iphone-app-sneaks-background-multitasking-mode

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kogir
That title is very misleading. Finding a way to get location from sources
other than the phone when the app isn't running is far from "Sneaking
Background Multitasking."

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DarrenMills
That's partially my bad. I copied the title of the article rather than re-
naming it. I considered it, but for whatever reason decided against it.

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tlrobinson
"and the iPhone takes no hit to its battery life as it's all running in the
cloud."

Um, what does that even mean? Does "cloud" just mean "a network" now?

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stcredzero
It means the author/editor or some combination is a bit muddle-headed about
how this works.

Here's my guess. There's software in the cell towers that now forwards ping
times to a server somewhere that does the triangulation, as opposed to your
handset. This way, the iPhone doesn't have to do anything it's not already
doing, hence no drain on battery life.

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derefr
It seems to me that, right now, location polling is really the major reason
people request background processing. If Apple would put a feature into the
settings that let the user regularly push their location to _Apple_ , and then
a section in the Notifications settings for whether each app could access that
location once pushed, a large swath of complaints would be eliminated at once,
and the battery life would only have to be spent in one place, instead of
being hacked in by each app that you want to track you.

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omouse
Isn't there another smartphone that lets you use background processing?

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jawngee
Almost everyone except the iPhone: Android, WinMo, WebOS, Blackberry, Symbian.

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jawngee
I have a few questions:

* How the F does this work?

* Is AT&T involved?

* Is any of this data admissible in a court of law?

* Why would you want to broadcast your location to a list of people constantly 24x7 - outside of some kind of job requirement?

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timdorr
Yes, AT&T is involved. Go into your account on wireless.att.com and under the
My Profile section is a location privacy tab. Just saw this today when looking
for my contract expiration date. Pure coincidence, I swear...

