11 months after iOS 4.0, 31% of apps don’t multitask [App File Stats] | Hacker News Reader

11 months after iOS 4.0, 31% of apps don’t multitask [App File Stats]

amitay.us

24 pointsdanielamitay23 comments

The article only analyzes free apps, so there is definitely going to be some selection bias here. Many apps (especially most free ones) would not have any use for multitasking anyhow.

I don't enable multitasking in my apps because I'm worried the bugs will accumulate in a long-running instance, and many users don't necessarily know to restart the app. I am planning to add component-by-component restart logic and trigger it periodically before enabling multi-tasking.

Indeed. It's a good idea to even put a "if anything looks weird, exit(0)" in the app. You can easily get a system service into a state where you can't recover.

I'm curious what their definition of "multitasking" is... To begin with, iOS doesn't really support multitasking in the general sense of the word. You can save application state when the app moves into the background and restore when the app comes back into the foreground, but, in general, there's no way to run two apps at once. So, in essence, if you compile with a newer SDK, you've effectively implemented "multitasking" by conforming to the new APIs. As others have pointed out, though, there are a lot of apps for which there is no need for "multitasking" in that sense. So, is their definition apps which explicitly save state or something else? To me, it sounds like a relatively meaningless statistic. The more interesting statistic is the percentage of apps built with old SDKs...

Interesting how most developers prefer to have their icons left as-is. That shine doesn't seem too popular.

Who cares? Why do most applications need to multi-task? What interesting discussion is there to be had about this topic?

Are there any statistics regarding the penetration of iOS 4.0 compared against an earlier version?

Are there compatibility issues [i.e. if i built against an older version, would that run on the latest version of iOS]? If not, why would people have to rebuild? I'm specifically looking at this statistic: "186 apps were built with pre-4.0 sdks"

In the iOS games we made, we opted out explicitly. The games weren't ones that people would quit and relaunch with great frequency, so it made sense to just not bother. By the time they relaunched it, it probably would have been terminated in the meantime by the OS anyway, just due to normal use of other apps.

Some apps don't really need multitasking. I have a few apps that I would be annoyed to run in the background.

Sounds about right to me. I would think for things like games targeted to kids resume-state would actually not be a desirable feature.

or 69% of apps do multitask.

I agree, this should be good news, Android has the same "problem" with the "save in sd card" feature.

I reckon that most developers don't bother to update their apps once it's in the store. They make their initial $0.99 and leave it as is. There might be the occasional bug fix if they find their ratings drop, but that's it.

Would you be interested in stats regarding the age of those 2000 apps?

Are such stats (readily) available? As the inventory in the app store ages, I hope Apple applies adjustments to its rankings to identify "zombie" apps, those that perhaps had their day but have grown long in the tooth.

I'm not suggesting that an app isn't a good if it hasn't been updated in a while—I still love IA Writer despite it not having been updated in nine months(?)—but increasing app counts make for a looming merchandising nightmare, and Apple (and other app store runners, such as Google, who will have more apps on its hands come 9:02am on August 19th, 2011 according to a market research firm) is going to need to incorporate more signals in its app ranking, selection, and automated merchandising systems.

I would be interested in knowing why you chose this submission title. It seems very dishonest considering 1. the selection bias, 2. the fact that multitasking would not be practical or useful for all of those apps, and 3. it could have just as easily been worded to stress that 69% of apps do have multitasking.

Surely you considered these points when you wrote that title. Surely there was something else in the statistics that was more worthy of note, but it wouldn't have awarded you the same degree of attention.

Sad really.

Recompile (current XCode).

Resubmit.

Multitasking!

Not so. The article states that 431 out of the 617 non-multitasking apps have explicitly disabled multitasking. Perhaps they have no use for multitasking and would prefer to reset the application state each time the app has launched.

I am surprised.

Only two or three of the apps installed on my iPod would have any use for multitasking. Besides not being that useful, multitasking limits you to iOS 4 devices and there are lots of iOS 3.x devices out there.

Not at all! Multitasking support, even with the VoIP or Audio profiles, does not prevent you from supporting iOS 3: those users just won't get the multitasking features, just like iPhone 3G an iPod 2G users don't on iOS 4.x.

That's good to hear. Still, for most applications, multitasking is not a big requirement. You don't want Angry Birds to keep running while you browse, or the browser to waste any CPU cycles while you reply to an SMS.

Angry birds isn't actually running in the background (it's multitasking enabled). It is not wasting CPU cycles or RAM. It's basically recalling its session state from when you closed it, to make it look like it was running in the background. There are only certain instances when iOS has things running in the background, and these are only allowed through public API calls.

And the "certain instances" when you can run things in the background are incredibly limited... You can finish network calls or set an alarm, for instance, but you can't actually run your app in the background. When Apple first announced multitasking, I was really excited, only to learn that it was more or less 4 new, very limited, API calls. IMO Apple pulled a bit of a bait and switch with the term "multitasking."

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