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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

Recently someone compared weird downvotes to cosmic rays. They are going to strike but they are mostly harmless. Upvote back and carry on.

On topic: I’m not sure whether architectural decisions hamper iOS multitasking – it seems to me that the UI for multitasking in iOS just isn’t very good [0]. There are some edge cases where true multitasking would be great but I think that Apple is for the most part facing an UI problem, not an architectural problem.

[0] There isn’t much of a multitasking UI, actually. There is this horribly inaccessible row of recently accessed app icons and nothing else. If only it weren’t beneath Apple to shamelessly copy WebOS or Android.

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I suspect most people never noticed the addition of multitasking in iOS. Suddenly Pandora didn't stop playing when they checked a mail message and their apps reopened much faster, but they probably credited/blamed the app developers for that. I wonder what percentage of users don't even know about the double-click-home menu.

I think multitasking UIs on touch devices (where apps are usually 100% of the screen) are more confusing for users than just going back to the icon on the home screen. Users get that more than one thing is running at a time in a windowed environment -- you can see both of them at the same time if you position your windows properly. I'm not sure they bring that understanding along when they pick up a tablet.

I don't totally disagree but multitasking doesn't have to be only user-facing apps. The notification system in Android is light-years ahead of iOS and it relies entirely on having a good multi-tasking environment. Importantly, the notifications don't have to just be from some specific set of things-that-can-notify a user as chosen by Google. Pretty much any kind of app can notify a user of anything.

In theory iOS is more than capable of supporting this on the backend, but the front end architecture is a mess and would have to be significantly reworked for even this kind of basic thing (well, it seems basic on an Android device it seems so obvious there).

My main problem with multitasking on iOS is that there isn't a good startup service implementation -- so for example if I restart my phone and don't open Google Voice at least once, I won't get push messages from it.

However, one of the reasons the platform performs well (esp. with battery life) is that the OS can kill a background process at will, and apps expect that and are usually designed to handle that gracefully. Hopefully there's more work coming to make this less of a trade off, especially as new phone versions have more resources.

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