Rumor: Apple working towards putting background processes on the iPhone

Apple apologists aside, there is no reason to disallow background application other than as others have commented, not enough executable RAM and wanting to control the user experience.

The battery draining excuse is a pathetic cover story, windows mobile, blackberry, symbian all run third party background apps (even with significantly less executable RAM on some) fine with no power drain issues. Sure there is the occasional misbehaving app, but you just choose to not use it, and problem solved.

Any user who's jailbroken their handset and looked at "top" in terminal can see that all Apple apps can be backgrounded, and stay backgrounded until the device runs too low on memory.

Saying push notifications are the silver bullet instead of background apps is just braindead. I'd really like to see their explanation for how an app like Pandora or ShoutCast can be run via push notifications.

It has more to do with their perception of a good user experience than anything else, and consumers lose their choice to run the device how they want as a result.

Actually, those two options are not only NOT mutually exclusive, but they are complimentary.

Allowing apple to vet certain apps that have ultra-low resource usage as "safe" to run in the background (with a global ability to disable it for all apps by the user) combined with the ability of an app that isn't vetted by apple to ask the user to run in the background...

I don't see why one method alone needs to be picked.

You state "as the one we've got now is just not built to run apps all the time, no matter who chooses them." but I am 99% sure the current iphone does use backgroup apps its just Apple decide which of thier apps do i.e. once opened the browser actually stays open, pretty sure it does not close down.

Calls coming in must be currently picked up by a background app looking for calls so much of what they need is already there is just the control mechanism that isn't.

To me the "user actually approves certain apps" is the ideal result. This means its on your head if your phone crashes. Would please lots of people out there but also mean those who don't know or want to run background apps would not be affected.

A little off topic here (sorry). In the photo above, I see a much nicer Facebook icon than I have on my iPhone. Mine has just a boring solid blue background, while the one above has some nice two-tone sketches on it. My version seems to be current. Is that an old icon? I like it much better than the solid blue one. Anyone know? Just curious.

I'd love to be able to view and edit notes while recording in order to leave all the paper and stuff at home when I'm about to do an interview, etc.

"...one is user-based, in which the user actually approves certain apps to run in the background..."

That is exactly what I have in mind since they came up with "no background processes, causes battery drain, bla bla" thing. I mean, is there any other operating system with such a restriction out there? Being able to run multiple applications is a core functionality today. And I don't think that hardware being incapable is an excuse. Yes, 128mb ram prevents to run lots of applications with high hardware demand, but I didn't hear any user who wanted to run Resident Evil, Safari and some other resource hog at the same time. I think current hardware is capable enough to allow us switch between 3-4 regular applications. Apple can let users decide how many applications they want to run at the same time. This way, Apple won't feel guilty about battery life and performance issues because it is our decision, and we will get what we want. However, this applies for the current generation of iPod touch and iPhone, and Apple should really feel guilty if they still put users in a place where they should make a choice between performance and the ability to run multiple apps in future generations of these devices.

I'd like to see that Apple creates a special API so that a program can create special background processes. Usually, there's no need to run an entire application in the background, but only a small part of it. For example when you want to have a GPS tracker application track your coords while you're surfing the web, there's no need to have the whole GPS tracker app run in the background, but only a small part of it - a tiny process that just collectes your coords and writes them to a log file. Or when you want to have an Internet radio app stream the music while you're playing a game, there's no need to have the whole app running in the background with all of it's GUI and stuff loaded, you just need a tiny process which receives the stream from the Internet and plays it to your earbuds. Each of these apps which such a special background process could have a setting that you can turn on or off which configurs if this process remains alive when you close the app or not, soyoucan decide for which apps you want this or not.

Yaa,I think that background apps will need new hardware. The current hardware is too limiting, particularly the amount of RAM available.

The stuff on Cydia works pretty decently... I don't see why the "you just can't do it on the iphone right now" is still the case. Let us choose - I love the iPhone but hate "Apple knows how to use your phone better than you do" aspect.

With Backgrounder from Cydia (jailbreak), I'm able to background apps. It's very handy for switching momentarily to something else; to answer a text message, for example. Just background the app, send the text, and head right back to the original app. Works great. I don't IM, so there's no app that really needs to run constantly in the background, so I can't vouch for battery vitality. I can say that it's no big deal to have a couple apps running the in background as far as memory goes.