Ask HN: How often do you use the iPhone's overhyped multitasking feature? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How often do you use the iPhone's overhyped multitasking feature?

7 pointssolipsist20 comments

It seems as if the whole world was dying a year ago to see multitasking appear on the iPhone. It was the biggest argument against the phone. Now that it has been around for a while, I'm wondering how many people actually make use of it. I understand that many of the casual users are unaware of the feature itself and how to access it, and others just find it annoying. Do any of you use the feature on a regular basis?

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I use it without knowing it. Multitasking still works even if you don't use that fast switch screen.

I would have preferred something like the WebOS card model though. Oh and web page "tabs" still suck in MobileSafari

The multiple pages feature in mobile Safari definitely needs improving; half the time it reloads the page when I go back to it. Actually, improving mobile Safari, especially on iPad, should be Apple's #1 focus right now IMO.

I hate it. There's no easy way to exit, rather than minimize, so I always end up closing 10-20 apps at once. It's useful for some features, but most of the apps I use don't use those features.

So do I. To summarize the reasons:

1. Most apps (as you said) don't support it

2. The apps that I switch back and forth between are not the ones that support it

3. There is no alternative to keeping the app open when you exit (see: http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/the-problem-with-home/)

4. There is no easy way to close all the apps at once. Everyone I know has to manually go through each app and close them, just as you said.

5. No one has ever fully addressed the issue. I'd like to see some tech people (or even John Gruber) explain their take on the seemingly useless feature.

I think Apple considers the inability to close apps a feature, rather than a bug. The idea is that you should only be concerned with what app you want to be using at any particular moment, and let the system take care of which ones are still in the background.

I have been using multitasking heavily since I got iOS 4.0, and I don't understand the complaints you have. Could you be more specific about what causes you to need to close 10-20 apps at once, or the workflows that cause you to be troubled by the inability to explicitly terminate apps?

> I think Apple considers the inability to close apps a feature, rather than a bug.

I agree with this statement, but that's because Apple is underestimating its customers. They always aim to achieve things in the simplest ways possible - often meaning that features many customers would like are left out. There is an ongoing debate on whether or not this behavior pays off, but I think that in this case they forgot to fully consider who would be using this feature the most. That is, the tech-savy users with a better idea of what's going on. These users are bothered by the simplicity of the featured, which ends up interfering with their workflows [see below]

> The idea is that you should only be concerned with what app you want to be using at any particular moment, and let the system take care of which ones are still in the background.

The idea is not that you should only be concerned with the app you are using at that moment, but also the app that you are wanting to switch to. That's the simplicity Apple is thinking about: how to get the average user from App A to App B in as little time as possible. However, with the current system, apps never close (unless the device is restarted). What that means is that, after a day or two of use, the multitasking tray/bar is cluttered with every app you have on your phone. For some people (like me), this means HUNDREDS of apps that need to be scrolled through 4 at a time! Now getting from App A to App B doesn't seem so easy. The fact that all these apps that support multitasking have saved their last state and will be quick to start up is good, but the multitasking tray/bar is useless nevertheless. It would be faster for me just to close App A, which I'm currently in, and navigate to App B on the home screen and open it from there where it's last state is still remembered.

On a side note, I'm unsure why Apple gives the user the ability to delete an app from the multitasking tray in the first place. As you said, they only want the user to be concerned with the app they're in and want to let the system take care of the rest. Once you have all your apps in the multitasking tray (which will inevitably happen), the only reason why you would remove a particular app is if you hate it and know you will not use it for a long time. This removes clutter and doesn't have to be done that often, but the feature to delete apps from the multitasking tray still does not make sense to me.

> Could you be more specific about what causes you to need to close 10-20 apps at once, or the workflows that cause you to be troubled by the inability to explicitly terminate apps?

The first part of this question was covered above, but I'd like to answer the second part as well on why we need to terminate apps in a convenient way. Multitasking may be useful if it was only needed between 5 or 10 apps at a time. However, even if those are the ones you use most commonly, there will still be dozens of others that you open at other times - even if it's less frequent. These apps build up and, as I discussed earlier, can only be removed in a tedious way. But, if there was a convenient way of terminating apps when you were done using them, things would be a lot easier. When using your favorite apps you would not completely terminate them, as you would like to keep them running in the background and in your multitasking tray for later use. However with apps that you know you were only using on a rare occasion, you could use a different, but still convenient, hardware function to completely terminate them when you were exiting them - hassle-free. This way you would only have to worry about 5-10 of your favorite apps in the multitasking tray, and not 100-200.

tl;dr - In some cases, Apple simplifies features too much, which results in a lack of functionality. Multitasking is an example of that. The biggest problem with it is that a large number of apps build up in the multitasking tray/bar over time, and therefore there is no easy way to navigate between apps with the multitasking feature. Apple should offer another hardware function that allows users to completely terminate apps (and therefore not put them in the multitasking tray). Users would only keep apps they used often in the tray, and terminate all apps they think they wouldn't use later.

The thing is, the multitasking tray displays applications in MRU order, so it already does what you're asking for in your last sentence. The tray as the equivalent to alt-TAB on a desktop, which is handy for MRU switching, but pretty annoying if you have lots of windows open.

I would presume most users, if they haven't used an app recently, or if they don't feel like using the tray, will just access it as normal through the regular menus or Spotlight search.

MRU order works fairly well, although it's definitely not ideal. With the iPhone I feel that it lacks even more than it does with the computer. That's because of the fewer apps you can see on the screen at a given time when you're using fast app-switching. And since we usually have more apps open on our iPhones than our computers (because one has a "Quit" feature while the other doesn't), it becomes increasingly frustrating. MRU works great until your workflow starts to become more complicated and when the number of apps in the tray start to build up.

Most of the apps in the lower reaches of the multitasking tray are already terminated for you, because the system kills apps in the background as foreground ones request more resources. You don't need to be as concerned about the tray as you do about top or Task Manager. As parasubvert said, it's an MRU apps list. It's not an 'open windows' list. If you want to switch to an app you used a long time ago, frequently it's faster to find it in the main interface.

Deleting apps from the tray is a sort of 'power user' feature that lets you effectively force quit an app if it's in a bad state.

Since I've written this gigantic post, I've learned a few more things about the process[1][2] and have changed my stance for the most part.

In a nutshell, the multitasking tray is simply a way to access apps recently used. The tray sorts itself in an MRU order and removes apps once enough time has gone by without being used. Apps in the tray can either be running or not running, depending on whether or not they support multitasking.

The effectiveness of MRU order and the need for another hardware option can still be argued, but I think you have at least helped me settle what the multitasking tray really does. Thanks.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2065582 [2] http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/mobile_multitasking

I use it pretty much all the time, though mostly the "double-click home button" to fast switch between applications. Most apps seem to support fast switching (where I don't have to wait for them to re-initalize), though a few don't.

Otherwise it is helpful if I'm doing AirPlay to my speaker system from Pandora or the iPod... or if I'm downloading in the background (app updates or podcasts, or whatnot).

I don't even have a sufficiently updated firmware to take advantage of it. Still with my 3g, so the stories of horrible performance scared me right after the initial release with multitasking came out. Haven't updated my phone since then, because I don't really see a need to use the other features.

I have a 3g with a firmware that is not recent enough to use multitasking as well, although it is jailbroken and I chose to enable multitasking when I set it up (it was an option given by the jailbreaking program). Little did I know at the time how bogged down the phone would become. The performance is horrible (the worst thing I've ever seen), and if I ever get the chance I'm going to try to disable it. However, I'm wondering how bad it is in comparison to if I was using the official multitasking feature on my 3g. I mean, right now, it literally takes 5 or 10 seconds for the phone to react when answering a call and half the apps crash on startup. I really need to do something....

I think you should probably upgrade to the latest firmware if you're experiencing that kind of performance degradation. My friends that initially updated kept up to date, and they don't notice those issues much anymore (exact same problem -- huge delays in answering phones... sometimes the phone wouldn't even pick up).

From what they say, that really hasn't been a problem for a while. But I just don't really see the need for it (multitasking is somewhat of a non-starter on the puny processor in the 3g... I think it's just a 533 MHz job). So even with the upgrade, I doubt you'll be able to multitask particularly well... but you will get your speed back.

the jailbreak option is the official multitasking, the unofficial multitasking is the one provided in the cydia repository, which in my opinion is better. Multitasking along with game center is unavailable to 3G users. Which is crap, especially now that there are games coming out that are requiring gamecenter logon.

All the time. Typically switching between safari, iPod, mail, iCal, twitter and Evernote

I assume these are the apps you use most often. When you open an app that you use less frequently (e.g. Stocks or Clock), do you manually remove it from the multitasking bar once you're done or do you leave it there?

Don't apps build up in the multitasking bar to a point where it is faster to close one of those apps and access another from the home screen, rather than using fast app-switching?

I use it all the time. That said, I got my first iOS device after iOS 4 came out, so I've been using it by default from day one. I recently got an iPad, and it really makes the flow from Pages to Safari to a research app nice.

I use it all the time, primarily for messaging applications like gTalk, Facebook Chat, AIM, and Skype.

I also enjoy when Facebook alerts me when friends check in nearby.

I may be mistaken, but are these not push notifications you are talking about?

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