
11 months after iOS 4.0, 31% of apps don’t multitask [App File Stats] - danielamitay
http://www.amitay.us/blog/files/detailed_iphone_app_ipa_statistics.php
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ZitchDog
The article only analyzes free apps, so there is definitely going to be some
selection bias here. Many apps (especially most free ones) would not have any
use for multitasking anyhow.

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DenisM
I don't enable multitasking in my apps because I'm worried the bugs will
accumulate in a long-running instance, and many users don't necessarily know
to restart the app. I am planning to add component-by-component restart logic
and trigger it periodically before enabling multi-tasking.

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sehugg
Indeed. It's a good idea to even put a "if anything looks weird, exit(0)" in
the app. You can easily get a system service into a state where you can't
recover.

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aliston
I'm curious what their definition of "multitasking" is... To begin with, iOS
doesn't really support multitasking in the general sense of the word. You can
save application state when the app moves into the background and restore when
the app comes back into the foreground, but, in general, there's no way to run
two apps at once. So, in essence, if you compile with a newer SDK, you've
effectively implemented "multitasking" by conforming to the new APIs. As
others have pointed out, though, there are a lot of apps for which there is no
need for "multitasking" in that sense. So, is their definition apps which
explicitly save state or something else? To me, it sounds like a relatively
meaningless statistic. The more interesting statistic is the percentage of
apps built with old SDKs...

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bronzebox
Interesting how most developers prefer to have their icons left as-is. That
shine doesn't seem too popular.

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absconditus
Who cares? Why do most applications need to multi-task? What interesting
discussion is there to be had about this topic?

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veyron
Are there any statistics regarding the penetration of iOS 4.0 compared against
an earlier version?

Are there compatibility issues [i.e. if i built against an older version,
would that run on the latest version of iOS]? If not, why would people have to
rebuild? I'm specifically looking at this statistic: "186 apps were built with
pre-4.0 sdks"

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beej71
In the iOS games we made, we opted out explicitly. The games weren't ones that
people would quit and relaunch with great frequency, so it made sense to just
not bother. By the time they relaunched it, it probably would have been
terminated in the meantime by the OS anyway, just due to normal use of other
apps.

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ltamake
Some apps don't really need multitasking. I have a few apps that I would be
annoyed to run in the background.

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jsz0
Sounds about right to me. I would think for things like games targeted to kids
resume-state would actually not be a desirable feature.

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tomelders
or 69% of apps do multitask.

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igorgue
I agree, this should be good news, Android has the same "problem" with the
"save in sd card" feature.

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jinushaun
I reckon that most developers don't bother to update their apps once it's in
the store. They make their initial $0.99 and leave it as is. There might be
the occasional bug fix if they find their ratings drop, but that's it.

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danielamitay
Would you be interested in stats regarding the age of those 2000 apps?

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edw
Are such stats (readily) available? As the inventory in the app store ages, I
hope Apple applies adjustments to its rankings to identify "zombie" apps,
those that perhaps had their day but have grown long in the tooth.

I'm not suggesting that an app isn't a good if it hasn't been updated in a
while—I still love IA Writer despite it not having been updated in nine
months(?)—but increasing app counts make for a looming merchandising
nightmare, and Apple (and other app store runners, such as Google, who will
have more apps on its hands come 9:02am on August 19th, 2011 according to a
market research firm) is going to need to incorporate more signals in its app
ranking, selection, and automated merchandising systems.

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J3L2404
Sad really.

Recompile (current XCode).

Resubmit.

Multitasking!

~~~
ZitchDog
Not so. The article states that 431 out of the 617 non-multitasking apps have
explicitly disabled multitasking. Perhaps they have no use for multitasking
and would prefer to reset the application state each time the app has
launched.

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rbanffy
I am surprised.

Only two or three of the apps installed on my iPod would have any use for
multitasking. Besides not being that useful, multitasking limits you to iOS 4
devices and there are lots of iOS 3.x devices out there.

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Xuzz
Not at all! Multitasking support, even with the VoIP or Audio profiles, does
not prevent you from supporting iOS 3: those users just won't get the
multitasking features, just like iPhone 3G an iPod 2G users don't on iOS 4.x.

~~~
rbanffy
That's good to hear. Still, for most applications, multitasking is not a big
requirement. You don't want Angry Birds to keep running while you browse, or
the browser to waste any CPU cycles while you reply to an SMS.

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thehigherlife
Angry birds isn't actually running in the background (it's multitasking
enabled). It is not wasting CPU cycles or RAM. It's basically recalling its
session state from when you closed it, to make it look like it was running in
the background. There are only certain instances when iOS has things running
in the background, and these are only allowed through public API calls.

~~~
aliston
And the "certain instances" when you can run things in the background are
incredibly limited... You can finish network calls or set an alarm, for
instance, but you can't actually run your app in the background. When Apple
first announced multitasking, I was really excited, only to learn that it was
more or less 4 new, very limited, API calls. IMO Apple pulled a bit of a bait
and switch with the term "multitasking."

