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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

iOS really needs a channel for legitimate, real background apps. A lot of its battery life and security advantages over Android come from the fact that it doesn't allow a wild-west of background processes, but there are certain cases where you really do just need that.

Apple is good at taking use-cases and creating cohesive stories around the right way to serve them; this one has been long-coming.

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Agreed. Camera upload to DropBox is one situation I've run into. Currently it seems like it's using some janky set up where each time I change location it triggers an event to look for new photos to upload but this results in Apple notifying me of DropBox looking up my location X amount of times in the last few days.

Yeah, I think I declined that option so instead every time I open the Dropbox app, I get a notification 5 minutes later saying uploads were paused. It's exhausting.

Apple does have a small number of very specific use cases carved out where they allow apps to run in the background, like VOIP apps and audio players. But “I just want to run in the background to do stuff” has never been a legitimate use case in their view.

I honestly don’t know how you manage this with a normal user/consumer without a flood of “my battery life is gone” complaints.

Even with opt-In messaging how many people just click “ok” thinking the app needs it.

They could do it the same way they did it with background location (what this whole article is about) - keep pestering the user "this app has used 15% of your battery in the background, disable background processing for it?". Only the most die-hard IRC users will keep allowing it.

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