Steve Jobs on Lack of Custom Wallpapers in iOS 4 for iPhone 3G

[Xian Zhu Xuande]

Seems there's quite a contrast.

People that cant have wallpapers are up in arms over the lack of support.
People who can have wallpapers are saying they aren't bothered by it.

I imagine the people who can have wallpapers are thinking about it from a rational perspective—easy to do while they've go the feature—and those without are having are dealing with their disappointment at having been left behind. It might please them to remember that their products still work every bit as well, or better, than they did originally, and to remember that Apple's habit of updating older devices in the mobile phone market was a near alien concept before they changed the game with the iPhone.

In technology, though, that's how things roll. You either pay the extra money to stay at the front, or you learn to remain happy with device you were excited enough to pay for originally despite the progression of technology which has taken it off the bleeding edge.

 

[Eric S.]

People really care about this?

 

[HLdan]

Some of you guys here really need to put yourselves in check. I've worked in the cell phone industry for 7 years and each time a new phone comes out with a higher grade OS and new features the old phone is dust, period. No software upgrades or anything. It's most likely true that iOS4 would perform poorly on the iPod Touch 2G or the iPhone 3G with custom home screen wallpapers. Do you want a poor experience or do you want it to work? Nobody, including the iPod Touch users (myself included) didn't pay for this upgrade so you have no just cause to vote this article negative, some people here are just pathetic with these rude responses. They can't get what they want so they vote negative and accuse Steve Jobs of purposely forcing people to upgrade. Well, if that's true about him he and Apple wouldn't be the first or only company that does this.
Palm was the worst with the Treo and Nokia is not empathetic to their customers with their older phones. The upgrade didn't cost you anything but time and people spend plenty of that here so get over it.

 

[rfahey]

Why does he care about the performance of the 3G? Doesn't he want everyone to upgrade to the iPhone 4?

But considering it may be 6 months before many people can even find one, many people are tired of staring at the same old black screen

 

[i-John]

It would have been nice to be an option to turn it on or off. Give your users a choice to turn on or off features if they so wish... oh wait, Apple isn't like that... Steve knows better than his users.

 

[frushie]

They aren't missing much, I find the screen a lot harder to read andd switched to the darkest wallpaper I could. Can't find an option for a plain black screen anywhere yet.

Try loading the camera app then just set your phone down flat on a table or something and snap a pic, there's your black background.

 

[room237]

I can't say I care THAT much about the wallpaper.

What I DO care about is that push email is DEFINITELY NOT WORKING on my 3G, on any of my accounts. That's what's pissing me off.

 

[gkarris]

Some of you guys here really need to put yourselves in check. I've worked in the cell phone industry for 7 years and each time a new phone comes out with a higher grade OS and new features the old phone is dust, period. No software upgrades or anything. It's most likely true that iOS4 would perform poorly on the iPod Touch 2G or the iPhone 3G with custom home screen wallpapers. Do you want a poor experience or do you want it to work? Nobody, including the iPod Touch users (myself included) didn't pay for this upgrade so you have no just cause to vote this article negative, some people here are just pathetic with these rude responses. They can't get what they want so they vote negative and accuse Steve Jobs of purposely forcing people to upgrade. Well, if that's true about him he and Apple wouldn't be the first or only company that does this.
Palm was the worst with the Treo and Nokia is not empathetic to their customers with their older phones. The upgrade didn't cost you anything but time and people spend plenty of that here so get over it.

LOL, funny...

I've never had a problem with wallpapers on my original jailbroken iPhone...

But also, I've never had a problem with Hypercard on my Mac Classic in System 7 either...

 

[reactions]

Custom wallpapers have obviously been supported on jailbroken iPhones and iPod touches for quite some time, so it is not entirely just how Apple's implementation differs, but it seems clear that Apple's implementation of custom wallpapers simply didn't reach the company's standards for performance during the development and testing process.

Does anyone actually believe this? LOL

come on even iphone fanboys like myself know that this is complete bullcrap. anyone care to say otherwise?

marketing decision is what it is - nothing more -

 

[uberamd]

Custom wallpapers have obviously been supported on jailbroken iPhones and iPod touches for quite some time, so it is not entirely just how Apple's implementation differs, but it seems clear that Apple's implementation of custom wallpapers simply didn't reach the company's standards for performance during the development and testing process.

Does anyone actually believe this? LOL

come on even iphone fanboys like myself know that this is complete bullcrap. anyone care to say otherwise?

marketing decision is what it is - nothing more -

Ugh, another uninformed person. Shadows and effects require horsepower that the 3G doesn't have. Nuff said.

 

[Xian Zhu Xuande]

Try loading the camera app then just set your phone down flat on a table or something and snap a pic, there's your black background.

Black iPhone Background Give that a shot. Flickr converted it to a JPG, but I don't think any additional levels of compression are going to introduce anything but black. That'll get you back to the old-school black background. Or folks can just create something similar in whatever image editor they use.

 

[TheGodfather]

It would have been nice to be an option to turn it on or off. Give your users a choice to turn on or off features if they so wish... oh wait, Apple isn't like that... Steve knows better than his users.

Steve does know better, most users are completely clueless.
That said: you have the option to jailbreak and turn on the wallpaper.

 

[afishertx]

I can't get the wallpapers to work on my 3G! Or Snow Leopard on my PowerMac G4! What's the deal!!!!

 

[johnnyjibbs]

Surely this is nonsense! If Apple is so perfectionist about it running too slowly, then the code must be way too inefficient! (which is not the way to be coding for memory- and processor-limited devices!)

I get the point, but even my Amiga 500 would probably been able to cope with a background screen...

 

[macjunk(ie)]

IMO...we are not in a position to call this BS or not...
I think it must be true cause iOS4 has been slow on my 3G...

What do you think Steve will gain if he prevents freakin' wallpapers for 3G users? He is giving the whole OS free anyway

And I would think he knows the mechanisms of iOS4 better than anybody out here!

Peace.

 

[Xian Zhu Xuande]

Surely this is nonsense! If Apple is so perfectionist about it running too slowly, then the code must be way too inefficient! (which is not the way to be coding for memory- and processor-limited devices!)

Ugh. No. Transparency and animation are not trivial on slow processors.

I get the point, but even my Amiga 500 would probably been able to cope with a background screen...

No. But funny, at least.

 

[stevensr123]

Ugh, another uninformed person. Shadows and effects require horsepower that the 3G doesn't have. Nuff said.

So the 3G has the ability to play 3d games, but does not have the horsepower to display a few f***ing shadows and effects?

 

[Burger Thing]

Custom wallpapers have obviously been supported on jailbroken iPhones and iPod touches for quite some time, so it is not entirely just how Apple's implementation differs, but it seems clear that Apple's implementation of custom wallpapers simply didn't reach the company's standards for performance during the development and testing process.

Does anyone actually believe this? LOL

come on even iphone fanboys like myself know that this is complete bullcrap. anyone care to say otherwise?

marketing decision is what it is - nothing more -

[/Insert Patrick Stewart's Facepalm Picture here]

 

[uberamd]

So the 3G has the ability to play 3d games, but does not have the horsepower to display a few f***ing shadows and effects?

Yeah, exactly right. Rendering shadows on a wallpaper for a wall of wobbling icons is a completely different situation.

 

[aristobrat]

Custom wallpapers have obviously been supported on jailbroken iPhones and iPod touches for quite some time, so it is not entirely just how Apple's implementation differs, but it seems clear that Apple's implementation of custom wallpapers simply didn't reach the company's standards for performance during the development and testing process.

Does anyone actually believe this? LOL

come on even iphone fanboys like myself know that this is complete bullcrap. anyone care to say otherwise?

marketing decision is what it is - nothing more -

Marketing decision? As if someone is going to decide to shell out $199+ for a new phone because they can't get wallpapers? Please.

 

[ouimetnick]

I can't say I care THAT much about the wallpaper.

What I DO care about is that push email is DEFINITELY NOT WORKING on my 3G, on any of my accounts. That's what's pissing me off.

Same problem here. So i enables IMAP gmail, but kept the google Sync part on. it can at least sync my contacts and calender. Whats strange is, I put the GM iOS 4 on my 3GS on June 9 or something, and Google Sync worked fine. i got my mail pushed like expected. But yesterday, it stopped working fine, and I didn't even update the phone. It stopped working while i was on IOS 4 Gm that I put on my phone on June 9. And of course its not working on the final public build either.

 

[alent1234]

So the 3G has the ability to play 3d games, but does not have the horsepower to display a few f***ing shadows and effects?

iphone OS and OS X share a lot of common code. OS X the graphics go through the GPU. the 3GS has a GPU and i bet with OS 4 all the nice graphical goodies need a GPU

 

[Xian Zhu Xuande]

Yeah, exactly right. Rendering shadows on a wallpaper for a wall of wobbling icons is a completely different situation.

Funny to put it that way, but yes. You'll notice those games run at a much slower framerate than the Apple animation, and that they do not use anti-aliasing (except in more trivial cases; or through a toggle intended for newer devices). And the iPhone 3G could certainly do it—it's just that Jobs is unforgiving of lag or choppiness in this sort of thing.

 

[ChazUK]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A293 Safari/6531.22.7)

Wallpapers....

Hardly the be all and end all to the iOS platform is it? Enjoy all of the many other features your iOS device has!

 

[Meriana]

hm,, my 3g iphone takes depending on the app up to 3 to 4 seconds till displaying the homescreen. Adding wallpapers might have increased the time even further.

I don't mind the missing wallpapers.