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Comment by fredoralive | Hacker News Reader

3rd party apps couldn't do anything in the background until iOS 4, and it's always been a bit limited.

I think he's wrong about Android, although AFAIK Palm had a nicer task switching UI at first.

Yeah, Android had good support for multi-tasking from the start, though at least some early devices did not really have enough RAM for it to work well

Yeah, I am pretty confident I was able to keep apps running in the background on my T-Mobile G1 and some old forum posts I found seem to confirm my memory. [1] Multitasking/keeping apps in background and copy/paste were the big differentiators I remember on the first Android phones compared to the iPhone.

The app switcher UI for multitasking on Android didn't really exist yet though so WebOS was ahead there and I think that gave some people the illusion Android didn't support it at all.

[1] https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/t-mobile-g1-android-pho...

I thought proper Android task switching didn’t come until they released the first tablet version (Honeycomb, 2011). Interestingly enough this was after they hired away the webOS UX lead (Matias Duarte)

It had apps as cards to easily switch between them, useful animations and a completely working gesture control. It was absolutely revolutionary and having to fall back to Android after that was a big step down, until Android incorporated everything from webOS a few years later.

He is right in his analysis I think. The webos devices needed a price cut and time to build an app ecosystem, as evident by the hype around the fire sale and how many people really liked them then.

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