Gmail app in the background

[El3ctronics]

I don't have the iOS7 beta but I have a pretty basic question for those that do. Are apps like Gmail, Whatsapp, etc. now able to download their content (ie: messages) in the background so that when you open the apps they're readily available and don't first have to download? One of my biggest annoyances with iOS previously was that I'd get a push notification from an app but since it wasn't able to run in the background, the items wouldn't download until I opened the app. Thanks.

 

[Skyhigh223]

I think the apps will need updating to take advantages of new iOS 7 APIs which allow this, but yes, in iOS 7 they should be able to wake up and update themselves automatically in the background.

 

[El3ctronics]

Oh I didn't realize apps had to be coded to utilize these new API's. From the keynote it made it seem like the OS itself intelligently knew which are your most used apps and which to let run in the background and when.

 

[Skyhigh223]

Oh I didn't realize apps had to be coded to utilize these new API's. From the keynote it made it seem like the OS itself intelligently knew which are your most used apps and which to let run in the background and when.

Who knows. Not me.

In iOS 6, only Newsstand apps could do this background-wake-and-update thing, and they had to be specially made to be able to do that. Now that every app has the potential to do this in iOS 7, I imagine they'd need to be updated in a similar way to take advantage of the new feature.

 

[GreyOS]

Oh I didn't realize apps had to be coded to utilize these new API's. From the keynote it made it seem like the OS itself intelligently knew which are your most used apps and which to let run in the background and when.

what you mention is one of the changes to multitasking. I won't go into details about that...

But there are other changes, related to push notifications work. One is that push notifications can now wake an app, that app can do something with that notification like refresh its data, and THEN the notification is displayed to the user. Another thing is that you can have silent push notifications. The developer/publisher of the app can send notifications purely with the intent to wake the app and do something in the background. A notification is not displayed to the user in this case, it's purely to push a background update to the app.