
Apple Is Indeed Talking About Opening iPhone Background Tasks - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/15/apple-is-indeed-talking-about-opening-iphone-background-tasks/
======
blasdel
Apple Is Indeed Talking About All Kinds Of Shit They Could Do.

Having talked closely with their Developer Relations Engineers before, Apple
talks internally about all kinds of wild shit that never comes to fruition.

Over two years before .me was released, I was at a conference where Deric Horn
talked excitedly about their plans to turn .mac into a worldwide directory
system with free-ish accounts -- your local user account on your Mac would be
tied to it, and you'd be able to add .mac users to local groups, all sorts of
insane functionality. Needless to say, it didn't happen. The iPhone was
announced a few months later, obviously they had plenty of shit to do.

I think it's fair to assume that this happens on a regular basis, cause
sometimes you just have to work through your ideas before you know how tenable
they are.

------
windsurfer
Personally, I am not particularly excited about the potential that a
corporation _might_ be _permitting_ the hardware owners use such a mundane
concept as 'background tasks'. I think the far bigger story here is that the
hardware owners _still cannot_ control their device, that they have purchased,
as they see fit. I find it incredible that people put up with this.

~~~
zimbabwe
I own the hardware of my iPod touch. I have the right to jailbreak it, and in
doing so forsake Apple's promise to help me when things to wrong.

Of course I have control. I just don't have control if I use both Apple's
hardware and their software as Apple originally designed it. That's perfectly
within Apple's jurisdiction as a company.

I understand why you might think that their stance is ridiculous, but think of
it like this: Apple's design strategy is to make products that are foolproof.
That means blocking something like a background application that might ruin my
experience, even if that means taking away some of my control. It limits what
I can do, but within those limits I'm relatively safer. When I download an
application, there's no threat of it running in the background without my
knowing and sapping my battery.

Is it incredible that I put up with my iPod? I know full well that I have
control of who to purchase from. If I didn't want a closed system, I could go
somewhere else. Nobody forced me to use Apple products. Their monopoly is not
forced upon users; we accept it voluntarily. As a result, I get a music
player/video player/miniature computer that does many things very
effortlessly. When I buy an application, all I need to know is that it appears
as a little button I can click to run it. When I want to add music to my iPod,
all I do is make sure it's in iTunes, and then my player syncs. It's simple,
and it means that I don't waste any of my time whatsoever with my iPod. It
does everything I want and nothing I don't want.

I don't see why people find it hard to accept that some people want freedom at
the cost of effortlessness, and others want effortlessness at the cost of
freedom. It's not incredible or ridiculous. It's simply different philosophy.

~~~
windsurfer
May I ask why it is that every time there's an update, the jailbreakers have
to find yet another way in? Do you think maybe Apple doesn't want you getting
into your hardware?

~~~
zimbabwe
If you don't choose to get the update, you don't need to jailbreak. It means
that you don't get the advantage of Apple's own work, but that's part of the
deal. Either you can get Apple's updates or you can have absolute freedom of
your system. I view it as similar to the way that each new version of OS X
requires a new version of Shapeshifter for skinning, because Apple keeps
changing their UI inner workings. Apple's not beholden to the third parties
trying to change their system.

------
tophat02
Apple will do the same thing it always does with stuff like this: introduce a
system that accomplishes 50% - 80% of what people need and then listen to what
people scream the loudest about for where to go next.

First round: Push notifications. This (mostly) satisfies the loudest
screamers... "I HAVE TO RUN MY IM CLIENT TO GET IMs!!!"

It's all speculation from here on out, but...

Second round: Background Music. Apple will provide some API so applications
like Pandora can play their music in the background. This will necessarily
entail some amount of background processing to be allowed, but I'm sure it
will be heavily curtailed.

Third Round: Limited "full" backround support. Who know what this will look
like, but it will probably be something like the user can select N apps to run
in the background

By the end of the third round, hopefully the hardware and battery technology
will have advanced enough that Apple will allow any app to run in the
background

------
jcromartie
I'm actually glad that this is not currently possible, based on the average
quality level I see in iPhone apps. If it was opened up I could foresee a lot
of mysterious performance problems solvable only by restarting or somehow
managing specific processes. Enough of them have memory leaks and crash
randomly to begin with.

------
tlrobinson
Why not have some way to register small "background" programs as essentially
cron jobs? It could limit the time it's allowed to run to, say, 30 seconds,
and kill the process after. I think this would be long enough for most
background tasks, like updating your location, polling a server, etc.

~~~
zhyder
Shouldn't it be even simpler than that? Why can't the OS control context
switching at a fine grain with a policy like: 10% of time for all background
apps, and 90% for either the foreground app or for the sleep state. At worst a
background app won't get as many CPU cycles as it'd like, which I think is a
better compromise than the 2 extremes of no background apps and background
apps that can suck all the performance+power.

~~~
xenophanes
i think the first comment is focussed on preventing battery power draining,
and the second focussed on preventing background apps from slowing down
foreground apps.

both separate and valid concerns. and the suggested solutions are compatible.

------
ivankirigin
I'd love background passive filesharing. Pandora meets napster meets dropbox.
Pick songs from your peers that you'll probably like, store them on your
phone, and backup extra to the cloud.

Loopt that actually worked would also be great. No one updates their location
because you need to open the app. Background processing could fix this.

