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Comment by tjogin | Hacker News Reader

Some bullshit in here unfortunately.

"since iOS was not built from top-to-bottom for multi-tasking functionality, you have to address what continues to happen in the background as the user leaves app and you’re app has to scurry and get everything ready in within a short period of time, or iOS will completely shut it out"

This is just patently false. Multitasking was not an afterthought in this UNIX based OS, the absurdity of that claim reveals the thickness of the author's bias. This compromise was made to save battery life as well as to make sure users are aware of what their device is doing at any given moment.

There's a lot of other obviously stupid claims in there too, I'll leave those as an exercise for the reader.

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Agreed on the multitasking. iOS was never incapable of general multitasking, easily shown by its Unix-basis and easily demonstrated by jailbreaking.

It was however intentionally crippled to not allow arbitrary application-level multitasking because Apple decided it didn't serve them well. So as far as a normal user was concerned the OS was incapable of multitasking.

So while inaccurate, that statement is not entirely off. You could not create an application and reliably have it do stuff in the background on iOS.

Apart from that I have to disagree with your statement: I find the rest entirely reasonable and valid criticism. And I have no doubt about the conclusion: The future of iOS will be more blatant stealing from Android.

And that is OK. Really it is. Just stop that nonsense about Apple being the innovator.

The rest was reasonable? How about backgrounds? Is it reasonable that Apple copied backgrounds from Android? Is it reasonable to assume that Apple hadn't thought of the intricate and exotic feature of backgrounds if not for Android? Of course not, it's fucking preposterous!

The only reasonable thing in that article is the part about notifications, because Apple clearly followed Android on those. The rest is concentrated Android fanboyism.

Although notifications are most likely copied from their own jailbreaking community, if I remember well, not particularly from Android.

But then again, a notification bar instead of a popup is not the most ground-breaking idea. It's a pity (and a bit silly) that they didn't implement that earlier, for sure.

When you say "Multitasking was not an afterthought in this UNIX based OS" you implicate that iOS multitasking has something to do with the multitasking done on UNIX, which as far as i can tell is really not the case.

So, in this regard, iOS was released without multitasking which was baked in some versions later. it's not like they only needed to switch the underlying OS features on.

Also: I don't see how this saves battery life if done properly, years before iOS and Android other mobile OS' did multitasking with a similar battery life then the iPhone.

The only point that stands is that Apple (may be) didn't want to confuse users with multiple running apps, but then again.. why did they implement it in the end anyway?

My opinion: It was obvious that the iphone will have multitasking (and copy&paste and wallpapers, and what not) at _some_ point in the future. Imagine Steve's presentations in the coming years (while announcing a new iPhone/iOS version) without those "big improvements". You keep those things hidden to have some new features to throw at your customers. Android just happened to be first on some of those..

iOS had multitasking since day one. How do you imagine iPhone was able to get call when iPod app was playing? It was just not available for the third party apps, that's all.

Ohhh, that's stupid, of course it had multitasking, but if you didn't understand what I am talking about you probably shouldn't reply.

Also, in your sense every phone on the planet had multitasking because I can speak and listen at the same time.it was obvious that I was talking about multitasking for apps

The phone feature is implemented as an app.

What does it matter when other apps didn't have access to it?

So in the end everyone seems to agree that Apple, although easily possible, didn't want to give multitasking to its customers. Sounds even worse to me..

Android fanboys probably agree with that. But they're not everyone.

Let's just agree that multitasking as far as the argument in the article is concerned, is a UI/UX thing and has nothing to do with threading and processes.

That's incorrect, the author's argument goes way further than that, claiming that Apple's "sloppy implementation" is due to it being bolted on as an afterthought, having not thought of the concept of multitasking until after Android.

In reality, Apple's implementation consciously limits what apps can do in the background to stop apps from draining battery life or generally doing things that the user is unaware of.

You're saying their lack of feature was a feature. It's like saying my Nokia 5100 is so power efficient than your smartphone that it's better. Different intentions.

That comparison isn't even apples and oranges, that's apples and spaceships.

They deliberately limited functionality to provide a feature. They then provided more functionality which removed some of those original limitations.

Power efficiency has nothing to do with it in the slightest.

A lack of features is a feature of any Apple product. It's what makes them great, and accessible for the large public. It's the reason I absolutely love to USE my phone and iPad, and love to mess around with an Android device.

It's a lot harder to leave out features than adding. You have to be carefull about what you leave out, make sure you don't touch core-functionality, and make sure the features that are present are done brilliantly, because they will be in the spotlight, all the time. I'm not saying Apple does this flawlessly, I'm not a blind fanboy, they have serious misses (notifications pre-IOS5, Calendar app, IOS folders, ...) - but they do this a lot better than anyone else.

To be honest, I never had problems with "missing" features (except calendar/call overview in the lock screen), but more problems with the implementation of features that were present, but not executed well enough.

You argue that multitasking was always in mind because of the underlying POSIX threads. Of course an operating system has threads. You say it was because of CPU/power usage and also a UX simplification. Do you have any sources for these claims? We could speculate back and forwards but to me it just appears you're making assumptions here.

> There's a lot of other obviously stupid claims in there too, I'll leave those as an exercise for the reader

That's not how arguing against a point works.

Yep, it goes to the level that Apple had to actively prevent multi tasking behavior.

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