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Apple to Allow Background Tasks on iPhone?

tacoman667 said:
Don't hurt me for saying but I will jump ship on the iPhone as soon as the NVidia Tegra shipps in a smartphone that has either Android or WM on it, preferrably Android. The Tegra is leaps and bounds over anything out there. If the iPhone would incorporate it I would stay but Apple seems set in their ways. Not very "dynamic" of them. :(
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Huh??? You do know that Apple is creating its own SoC, right? Based on the same ARM architecture as Tegra...

And fortunately for them, they just bought out the company that had some of the best minds in designing low power / high speed chips for mobile devices.

While the Tegra may be good / great, there is no reason Apple cannot do better.
 
tacoman667 said:
How much do you know about tegra? In the demos I saw on youtube, it was displaing 720P video using about 1W of power, 1/10th the power of the Atom processor. All of that on a chip the size of a processor incorporating the entire motherboard worth of equipment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXYshhuJzh4&feature=PlayList&p=3094AF805137BBAE&index=0&playnext=1
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Don't get me wrong, I love the Tegra demos and if it was viable for a smart phone, Apple won't pass it over, but if you read a few articles, you'll see both NVidia and others indicate a target of MIDs and netbooks. Since OSX runs on ARM, it would be a nice fit for either the iPhone or Mac version of OSX.

http://blog.laptopmag.com/nvidia-ceo-sounds-off-on-netbooks-ion-platform-tegra-and-mids

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-9958076-23.html?tag=mncol;title
 
TheSpaz said:
If they allow apps to run in the background they'll be contradicting what they said about process managers and how they made fun of Windows Mobile. Also, running stuff in the background isn't just about battery life... what about available RAM? My iPhone hardly has enough RAM to have a web page open in the background with iPod running. The other day the iPod app crashed for no reason... I can see a lot of crashes for low memory due to 3rd party apps running in the background with possible huge memory leaks.

I just want Apple to make an iChat app.
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Just add more RAM to your iPhone.
 
By now, it's clear that something is holding up the Push notification service.

AT&T ??
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The same reason we won't see a front facing camera for video conferencing.
 
My theory on what happened to Push was Apple did not anticipate the sheer number of 3rd party applications that would come with the App Store.

Obviously, I don't know what goes on in Cupertino, but it's clear that Apple had a plan and they seemed pretty confident (re: the announced September date) it would work. Once the flood gates opened and Apple started doing some tests of their architecture based on the number of apps that would most likely take advantage of their Push service, it might be that they saw their plan and/or the scalability of it was not up to the task.

Sure, the massive number of apps gave them something to crow about, but behind the scenes, they were agitated at having to push back on Push until (a) they could get it working reliably enough or (b) come up with another idea that would work.

We've already seen Apple make fun of how other companies handle background processes, so they knew they couldn't take any of those routes. Maybe this is their solution until something better comes along.
 
aristobrat said:
If they truly designed the iPhone with no intentions of native third-party apps running (which is how they marketed it when it was released -- everything was to be a webapp, until they finally gave in), I guess 128MB probably made sense then.
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At which point, the 3G when it came out should have included 256MB.

128 is really shockingly stingy. Bad enough that the first gen was that puny, but really stupid that update did not have much more given the app store coming out.
 
I don't care about background processes as much, I care more for push notification services on all apps.

It would be nice/useful to have this for Facebook, LinkedIn, etc... Having to check for status updates and messages all the time is a bit cumbersome.
 
If this is only available on the next iphone I'm going to be so pissed...

Steve Jobs "what happens if you think of a really great idea 6 months later, you can't go around adding buttons....so we just built a giant screen".
 
Compile 'em all said:
That is a sad piece of news. So they can't get push right and will instead let apps run in background?
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This does not mean they can't get push right as it could possibly be market forces at work. Alot of people really feel limited by not being able to run more than one app at a time. Apple likely may not want the competition, now that they're getting closer to competing, to be using that against them.
 
Hattig said:
They probably found the problem was that even with push notifications, there actually was a background process running on the iPhone that would receive them. Unless the network operator created a special control channel message for them, these would have to be sent over the data portion, and thus you end up with a standard background process that does standard networking. Of course this process will be very optimised by Apple for its task.

You might as well allow other background processes to exist in that setup, if you create a special type of application for them (some kind of NSBackgroundApp eh?). Basically each background process will run in sequence once the system is woken up by a timer that runs these processes (but stays off otherwise to conserve battery power). These background applications may have artificial limitations in terms of CPU power, running time and memory usage in order to (a) conserve battery life and (b) not affect primary running applications.
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Bingo. Its not going to be "background full GUI apps". Its going to be a daemon that runs in its own user-space/sandbox with quota limits. Perfectly usable for these purposes.
 
network23 said:
My theory on what happened to Push was Apple did not anticipate the sheer number of 3rd party applications that would come with the App Store.

Obviously, I don't know what goes on in Cupertino, but it's clear that Apple had a plan and they seemed pretty confident (re: the announced September date) it would work. Once the flood gates opened and Apple started doing some tests of their architecture based on the number of apps that would most likely take advantage of their Push service, it might be that they saw their plan and/or the scalability of it was not up to the task.

Sure, the massive number of apps gave them something to crow about, but behind the scenes, they were agitated at having to push back on Push until (a) they could get it working reliably enough or (b) come up with another idea that would work.

We've already seen Apple make fun of how other companies handle background processes, so they knew they couldn't take any of those routes. Maybe this is their solution until something better comes along.
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Imagine if 5000 of those apps used push for things. Then you have 10 million iPhone users. And lets say an average of 100 or so notificatiosn a day (weather, alerts, AIM, etc...). Do the math - their bandwidth and server requirements would be out the roof.
 
skellener said:
AT&T ??
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akac said:
Imagine if 5000 of those apps used push for things. Then you have 10 million iPhone users. And lets say an average of 100 or so notificatiosn a day (weather, alerts, AIM, etc...). Do the math - their bandwidth and server requirements would be out the roof.
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As I mentioned above I hope Apple scraps their original concept in favor of just providing an iPhone location service. Then let Apple write an NSBackgrondApp which receives all notification requests and matches them to incoming notification responses which could come directly from another iPhone. Thus there is only one additional Apple created background app. I still believe they will allow a few additional background apps for things like radio.
 
Thats a bummer, the push notifications was a very slick way to handle this without killing the battery.

Everything I have read suggests the feature worked very poorly in beta and they went back to rewrite it. Maybe Apple just couldn't find a way to make it work.

Hell, look at how ungodly unreliable MobileMe is. I really hope this means Apple will open up sync to 3rd parties. If they leave it closed off, I hate to say it ... but Android _might_ become an option for me if Apple doesn't get off their ass. Sorry, but MobileMe is just awful.
 
Exactly; first post too.

TuffLuffJimmy said:
gah! hopefully it would be a combination of both. I'd love to have twitteriffic and tweetie off, but have updates pushed; and I'd love to have Things running in the background.
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Finally Apple is wising up. Push, while useful, only solves a limited number of issues. User multitasking is very important.

I however do understand the limitations of the current iPhone.
 
icrude said:
If this is only available on the next iphone I'm going to be so pissed...

Steve Jobs "what happens if you think of a really great idea 6 months later, you can't go around adding buttons....so we just built a giant screen".
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No, it will be available on all iPhones.
You'll just wish you had the new one as performance will riddle the previous two models (especially v1) virtually useless.
My hunch.
 
richxps said:
Wow i hope this so called rumor is TRUE.
All i need is two back round apps, weather and AIM.
Wow this will really make the phone close to complete.
PLEASE APPLE>>> PLEASEEEE
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Jailbreak...then you can have a Weather Icon that updates & AIM running in the background and more...

Until apple releases a "PUSH" service it will be useless, they are just taking what jailbreakers already have. What is scary is that apple is finally realizing that the iPhone hardware has to little RAM to do anything in the background. The phone is amazing but is lacking in such easily fixable things...unfortunately one of those things will require you to buy the iPhone 3, since you can't upgrade RAM in a phone as far as I know.
 
akac said:
Imagine if 5000 of those apps used push for things. Then you have 10 million iPhone users. And lets say an average of 100 or so notificatiosn a day (weather, alerts, AIM, etc...). Do the math - their bandwidth and server requirements would be out the roof.
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Well, Apple could have easily seen the consequences of such arrangement when they thought about it. It is not exactly rocket science.
 
Compile 'em all said:
Well, Apple could have easily seen the consequences of such arrangement when they thought about it. It is not exactly rocket science.
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They knew about the SDK and App Store BEFORE the launch of the iPhone 3G, so why didn't they add more RAM to this thing?
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

Many issues with battery life coming to an iPhone near you.

It will be very useful for some but I was really hoping for the push notification. Maybe they will get it up and runnig and both will be included.
 
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