Apple Is Indeed Talking About Opening iPhone Background Tasks | Hacker News Reader

Apple Is Indeed Talking About Opening iPhone Background Tasks

techcrunch.com

18 pointsvaksel16 comments

Apple Is Indeed Talking About All Kinds Of Shit They Could Do.

Having talked closely with their Developer Relations Engineers before, Apple talks internally about all kinds of wild shit that never comes to fruition.

Over two years before .me was released, I was at a conference where Deric Horn talked excitedly about their plans to turn .mac into a worldwide directory system with free-ish accounts -- your local user account on your Mac would be tied to it, and you'd be able to add .mac users to local groups, all sorts of insane functionality. Needless to say, it didn't happen. The iPhone was announced a few months later, obviously they had plenty of shit to do.

I think it's fair to assume that this happens on a regular basis, cause sometimes you just have to work through your ideas before you know how tenable they are.

Personally, I am not particularly excited about the potential that a corporation might be permitting the hardware owners use such a mundane concept as 'background tasks'. I think the far bigger story here is that the hardware owners still cannot control their device, that they have purchased, as they see fit. I find it incredible that people put up with this.

There are plenty of other phones where you can hack around with background processes, why should one company be forced to do what everyone else is doing?

Apple, one of the few smartphone innovators, has decided not to as a design decision in the interest of its customers (battery life). In the future releases background process will be added on as the hardware gets better - why not buy the other brands until then?

I didn't say anything about forced! It's up to them to do what they want. I just find it strange that they haven't, and I think it's ridiculous that it's news that they "might be considering" doing what everyone else is doing.

Apple thinks they know what people want. Their customers seem to agree. Shrug. This is nothing new.

They think most people would rather have no background processes than badly done background processes. They will allow it when they make it "just work". Maybe they are right, maybe wrong, but it's not an in-principle bad approach.

I own the hardware of my iPod touch. I have the right to jailbreak it, and in doing so forsake Apple's promise to help me when things to wrong.

Of course I have control. I just don't have control if I use both Apple's hardware and their software as Apple originally designed it. That's perfectly within Apple's jurisdiction as a company.

I understand why you might think that their stance is ridiculous, but think of it like this: Apple's design strategy is to make products that are foolproof. That means blocking something like a background application that might ruin my experience, even if that means taking away some of my control. It limits what I can do, but within those limits I'm relatively safer. When I download an application, there's no threat of it running in the background without my knowing and sapping my battery.

Is it incredible that I put up with my iPod? I know full well that I have control of who to purchase from. If I didn't want a closed system, I could go somewhere else. Nobody forced me to use Apple products. Their monopoly is not forced upon users; we accept it voluntarily. As a result, I get a music player/video player/miniature computer that does many things very effortlessly. When I buy an application, all I need to know is that it appears as a little button I can click to run it. When I want to add music to my iPod, all I do is make sure it's in iTunes, and then my player syncs. It's simple, and it means that I don't waste any of my time whatsoever with my iPod. It does everything I want and nothing I don't want.

I don't see why people find it hard to accept that some people want freedom at the cost of effortlessness, and others want effortlessness at the cost of freedom. It's not incredible or ridiculous. It's simply different philosophy.

May I ask why it is that every time there's an update, the jailbreakers have to find yet another way in? Do you think maybe Apple doesn't want you getting into your hardware?

If you don't choose to get the update, you don't need to jailbreak. It means that you don't get the advantage of Apple's own work, but that's part of the deal. Either you can get Apple's updates or you can have absolute freedom of your system. I view it as similar to the way that each new version of OS X requires a new version of Shapeshifter for skinning, because Apple keeps changing their UI inner workings. Apple's not beholden to the third parties trying to change their system.

You're conflating hardware and software. It is Apple's software--which they own, not you--that has a restriction on background tasks. Owners of the hardware can do what they like with it.

Apple will do the same thing it always does with stuff like this: introduce a system that accomplishes 50% - 80% of what people need and then listen to what people scream the loudest about for where to go next.

First round: Push notifications. This (mostly) satisfies the loudest screamers... "I HAVE TO RUN MY IM CLIENT TO GET IMs!!!"

It's all speculation from here on out, but...

Second round: Background Music. Apple will provide some API so applications like Pandora can play their music in the background. This will necessarily entail some amount of background processing to be allowed, but I'm sure it will be heavily curtailed.

Third Round: Limited "full" backround support. Who know what this will look like, but it will probably be something like the user can select N apps to run in the background

By the end of the third round, hopefully the hardware and battery technology will have advanced enough that Apple will allow any app to run in the background

I'm actually glad that this is not currently possible, based on the average quality level I see in iPhone apps. If it was opened up I could foresee a lot of mysterious performance problems solvable only by restarting or somehow managing specific processes. Enough of them have memory leaks and crash randomly to begin with.

Why not have some way to register small "background" programs as essentially cron jobs? It could limit the time it's allowed to run to, say, 30 seconds, and kill the process after. I think this would be long enough for most background tasks, like updating your location, polling a server, etc.

Shouldn't it be even simpler than that? Why can't the OS control context switching at a fine grain with a policy like: 10% of time for all background apps, and 90% for either the foreground app or for the sleep state. At worst a background app won't get as many CPU cycles as it'd like, which I think is a better compromise than the 2 extremes of no background apps and background apps that can suck all the performance+power.

i think the first comment is focussed on preventing battery power draining, and the second focussed on preventing background apps from slowing down foreground apps.

both separate and valid concerns. and the suggested solutions are compatible.

So the phone can go into a deep power saving sleep mode most of the time, and occasionally come out of sleep every few minutes.

I'd love background passive filesharing. Pandora meets napster meets dropbox. Pick songs from your peers that you'll probably like, store them on your phone, and backup extra to the cloud.

Loopt that actually worked would also be great. No one updates their location because you need to open the app. Background processing could fix this.

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