Even more significant to me (and some large competing industries): can you receive a VOIP call while using another app?
Skype on the iPhone/iPad is great, except for the need to pre-arrange simultaneous launch.
Skype could use push notifications for incoming calls just fine.
Are they fast and reliable enough? (My understanding was that part of the Urban Airship value proposition was helping to paper-over the unreliability of Apple's push notifications.)
You absolutely do not need multi-tasking (for 3rd party apps) to have background music. You simply need to expose the system media player as a service. I'd actually much prefer that solution. In fact, _most_ backgrounding needs would be better as a sensible system service call. Services could be provided for scheduling jobs, callbacks for location awareness events, etc.
Yeah, you're right. Streams are tricky- music and network too. I think Android solves it using services; would be interesting if Apple comes up with something different (I don't like daemons on my phone personally; but maybe it doesn't matter to most people.)
Sorry I accidentally downvoted you. I agree with you. From a consumer point of view not being able to play music in the background makes the iPhone OS seem incomplete.
To be clear, you can have music playing in the background, but only from Apple's iPod app, not from 3rd-party apps like Pandora.
I think it's also possible to play a background stream in Safari.
Those non-developers apparently never used DOS or other non multi-tasking OSs.