All this power and you still can't run a terminal app in the background. iPad is a powerful computer crippled by a phone OS that doesn't let you do what most computers were capable of doing even 30 years ago.
I am told if you use Stage Manager and you have the terminal app in the same stage as, say, your browser app or editor, it is not "in the background" as a process, even when it's occluded.
Though it seems to me that as soon as a window is taken full screen, it's on a new stage. So you have to use them windowed?
Or in Split View, which grants the same "both in the foreground" privileges.
Which is as bizarre and arbirary as much of the rest of iPadOS. Which as you suggest, needs to stop feeling so much like a 1980s co-operative multitasking system.
(Edit to add: I suppose it is not _ridiculous_ that multitasking is in some ways tied to visual presence: apps don't need to be quit, and that which is not on the screen is not running full time. Even if it does make it very difficult to use one for work. It's quite an iOS-ish thing, to make the relationship between what you can see and what is happening more concrete. The camera works this way after all.)
And an app could support Background App Refresh to get around this.
The workaround Termius apparently uses is absurd (and rather amusing): it adds location tracking it doesn't really need. Because apps that have location tracking enabled don't lose their connections:
https://support.termius.com/hc/en-us/articles/900006226306-I...
This is a clever solution but it does have a Kafkaesque quality.
At that point, just allow background refresh! Everyone is just working around the rule anyway, why does it even exist?
The App Store is so dysfunctional.
Because most developers are not working around the rule.
And if you allowed every app to permanently background you would compromise the iPad experience.
(we develop apps for iOS that need bg functionality)
No need to dive into per-app settings except maybe to determine the default behavior. You can do this dynamically based on which applications are running that you'd like to keep running (or not).
They could even justifiably restrict this capability to the M-series iPads given the substantial performance improvements (including efficiency cores) compared to the older A-series iPads if they wanted to create motivation to upgrade.
Apple Finally Plans to Release a Calculator App for iPad Later This Year https://www.macrumors.com/2024/04/23/calculator-app-for-ipad...