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What exactly goes on if Background App Refresh is enabled?

It seems like a lot of people have Apple's background refresh functionality confused with the way Android does it's background refresh. Let me set things straight here.

Android OS:

A lot of apps on Android have the option to auto-refresh every 15 min, 30 min, 1 hour or Manual. If for example you have facebook set to refresh every 30 minutes it will do just that. It doesn't matter if there is no new information or not it's still checking facebook every 30 minutes for an update. Run a few apps in this manner and you are indeed draining your battery.

iOS:

Apple learned that setting apps to auto-refresh in intervals (15min,30min,1 hour) isn't the most battery efficient way to do things so they implemented the background refresh in which how often a app refreshes depends on YOUR usage trends.

In theory if you check the weather every 9 hours eventually iOS will update the weather right as that 9th hour approaches rather than update it every 15, 20, 30min all day long.
 
I have several apps that I turn off cellular data for. With Background App Refresh, content is updated when I'm on wifi. Only annoyance is the dialog that informs you that cellular data is off every time that you open the app. Could definitely use a "Please don't tell me again" selection.
 
I'm not sure background app refresh works correctly for all apps... for example RetailMeNot will use the location in the background (if enabled in background app refresh) to tell you when you're close to a shopping center or mall and what deals are there... it's been my experience that this drains the crap out of my battery.. although I'm not 100% sure that's what's causing it. I don't know if it's bugged or if it's causing that at all :/
 
snappyfool said:
I dunno if you're really confused or I am. Your post, starting with "Really?" and discussing new responses on MR refreshing in Safari seemed like sarcasm, i.e. pointing out that Safari doesn't update in the background. But the post you replied to was already saying that no apps are really taking advantage of it. ?!

And Safari isn't in the list of apps you can turn BR on/off for.

Very confused!

edit: and the idea that Safari should refresh pages for you in the background is bizarre... Yes, in some contexts like a forum it might make sense, but the web is a big place. Do you want it refreshing your order submission, or refreshing a temporary page and thus losing it? How can it make the assumption that you want it to refresh? Nah.
Click to expand...

Yep. It isn't on the list. My bad. And that would explain why it does background refresh.

As for the web being a big place, it is. But the page that you last visited or are visiting are not. This is a minute amount of data and having it updated in the background is not unreasonable. Most apps are distillations of web page data anyways.
 
DramaLLama said:
I'm not sure background app refresh works correctly for all apps... for example RetailMeNot will use the location in the background (if enabled in background app refresh) to tell you when you're close to a shopping center or mall and what deals are there... it's been my experience that this drains the crap out of my battery.. although I'm not 100% sure that's what's causing it. I don't know if it's bugged or if it's causing that at all :/
Click to expand...

It's possible. Apple provided the API to devs in order to implement this feature into their apps but I don't know if it can be done wrong? :confused:
 
What exactly goes on if Background App Refresh is enabled?

Armen said:
iOS:



Apple learned that setting apps to auto-refresh in intervals (15min,30min,1 hour) isn't the most battery efficient way to do things so they implemented the background refresh in which how often a app refreshes depends on YOUR usage trends.



In theory if you check the weather every 9 hours eventually iOS will update the weather right as that 9th hour approaches rather than update it every 15, 20, 30min all day long.
Click to expand...


This is what I was referring to.

No app besides Alien Blue is really taking advantage of this. None that I know of.
 
All I've personally noticed is

Alien Blue: The Background Refresh allows Alien Blue to send me push notifications. I remember their changelog saying so. I never received them when I was on iOS 6 and now that I've gone to iOS 7, they've come in flawlessly. Also, when I tap the notification I'm taken directly to it; no loading required.

Tweetbot: I'm using it all the time. I've noticed that previously, I would open Alien Blue, browse for a bit, then go back to Tweetbot. I would have to pull to refresh or wait for the streaming to finish loading to see the latest tweets. With iOS 7, as soon as I go Tweetbot, the tweets are already loaded and I can begin scrolling through them.

I don't know the toll on battery life, but my iPhone 5 has lasted all day yesterday and today just like it did before iOS 7. So far, Background Refresh is one thing I actually like about iOS 7.
 
The idea of Background Refresh is amazing. However, the number of apps that TRULY support it is very small. That's why I have it turned off for most apps. I think we'll see a better iteration of this in iOS8 and maybe even more apps to support it by then.

Best example is Tweetbot, then Pedometer (on the 5s), and shopkick. Facebook background refresh (as is the case with Notifications) is useless.

Also, I have to disagree about battery life. After the latest Yahoo Sports update, Background Refresh cut on but I didn't realize it until after a few days of noticing that my battery was worse than before, I looked in Background App Refresh and turned this off. Back to normal after that.

So my experience is that a bad implementation of BAF is really bad for the battery, while a good one like Tweetbot doesn't have any major effects on battery life.
 
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