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Comment by trixie_ | Hacker News Reader

Background tasks are partly to blame for a device's performance degradation over time - see Windows and Android devices. I have more apps than anyone on my iPhone and the performance is still great. I can just imagine if all the stupid games I download were trying to run background tasks as well. I hope Apple lets us control what apps have permission to do this. Also I hope 'low power mode' auto-disables background tasks. Developers are going to take advantage of this in a way that often will not benefit the user.

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Frankly, looking at all my apps, the only use-case I have for background tasks is Google Photos, who I want to automatically upload my recent photos to the cloud. A very distant second would be communication apps running some kind of reconciliation once or twice a day, in case some notifications were missed.

I have no desires for any of my other apps to execute any tasks in the background.

IMO, any app that needs to download file sin background needs this. Audible and Pocket Casts for me personally because there are times when I want to download files for offline use and I have to keep the app open till the download is not complete.

On Apple's platforms you can get this with a background NSURLSession. It lets you express concepts like "Download this URL at a convenient time, preferably when the device is plugged in and connected to Wifi" or "Start downloading this now, but keep going even after this app is closed."

It's definitely more work to figure out than regular foreground URL fetching, though.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/url_loa...

And unfortunatelly iOS version doesn't use background tasks. So when in background it won't sync any of your photos. And app will also warn you about that.

You can already set "background app refresh" permissions on a per app basis in iOS12 (and it is disabled system wide if you're in low power mode). I hope this carries through to the new background tasks in iOS13.

I'm quite confident they'll give it its own permission flag, ask you about it, and ensure that any apps which use it will work without it.

I'd love for Dropbox to be able to upload my camera photos without requiring me to manually open the app every couple minutes.

Agreed. I’m very concerned about the impact this will have on battery life and general performance.

This could be great for battery life, if it allows the system to better schedule tasks that were going to happen anyway. For example, consider a photo app that auto-tags people's faces: rather than running that battery-draining computation while you're using the app, it could run at 4 AM when your phone is plugged in and has been locked for a while.

Which is why both UWP and Android are increasingly adding more restrictions on background tasks as well.

to be fair, background tasks can also be really cool. for example voice com. which does not need your phone to be awake anymore... like discrod currently does...

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