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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

You can run a Terminal app in the background for 30s.

And an app could support Background App Refresh to get around this.

"The terminal gets killed after 30s in the background" and "you can't run a terminal app in the background" are functionally the same statement.

I don't know. Termius doesn't do that does it? (Background App Refresh I mean)

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.

The "location tracking" thing is so absurd. Apps use the location tracking permission to stay active in the background. App Review says "why do you have this permission? you need to actually have a user-facing feature that justifies tracking the location to get it" so apps just add a pointless "my location history" feature that is not actually needed just to make App Review happy.

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.

> Everyone is just working around the rule anyway, why does it even exist

Because most developers are not working around the rule.

And if you allowed every app to permanently background you would compromise the iPad experience.

Apple have full control over process scheduling so there is absolutely no reason that it should compromise the experience at all. They could notify the app it's about to go into the background so that resource-intensive tasks can be paused, then severely limit CPU shares to preserve battery life and then notify it again when it's about to hit the foreground. That would be enough just to keep application state in memory or socket connections alive.

Is macbook experience compromised? They are essentially the same hardware now, and I didn't notice any issues with 'macbook experience'.

Right -- that's what I meant by Kafakesque. Though it's a bit more Brazil than Kafka, I realised after I made a cup of tea.

No, you actually can't. iOS and iPad OS can run 'up to 30s in the background', and it is typical for an app to be terminated instantly once a user opens a home screen or another app.

(we develop apps for iOS that need bg functionality)

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