Apple has claimed that the iPhone does not do background processing because supporting it would hurt the performance of the phone. Jobs has said Apple’s concern is that because the processor is limited, loading up the phone with background apps is likely to crash the machine or bring it to its knees.
I have discussed this issue in the past. I have also discussed Apple’s response to the issue, which is an improved way of handling notification of inbound events like instant messages, which would normally be implemented through a background task.
I understand Apple’s concern about background processing, but I personally think its pretty lame. As I have written, there are ways to handle Apple’s concern. But the interesting thing is that the first Android phone, The T-Mobile G1 has been announced and will be out in the wild available on October 22nd. Android has no restrictions at all on background processing, and the first Android handset, the G1 is pretty similar to the iPhone hardware.
The question is, will Android demonstrate that Steve was somehow disingenuous about this whole background processing thing, or will the Android team be shown to be foolhardy about this critical performance issue? Nokia’s Symbian-based phones seem to handle background tasks just fine, but admittedly I don’t think many people are motivated to load up a Nokia smartphone with software in the same way that people are doing with the iPhone. But Android is really a true test. There will be lots of software, an easy to use app exchange, and a sense of openness that will encourage experimentation.
I am personally very curious to see what happens in the Petri dish.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
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5 comments:
Hank,
I suppose you could look at it as a "mothering" issue.
Apple doesn't want to allow background tasks because they are afraid you might crash your phone running too many things.
Android is allowing background tasks and there will probably be crashes. But, that's your fault for running too many apps.
It's the difference between yelling at a child before they do something wrong, or letting them get hurt and learning a lesson.
We already have a pair of petri dishes in the form of Windows Mobile and PalmOS. They're both broken.
Even iPhoneOS, without *third party* background processes can still be broken very easily in my use. I just need to turn on push data sync and take the subway. Behold as my iPhone battery drains at an alarming rate.
Michael Critz - not sure what your point is. Windows Mobile takes the multi-process route and Palm OS is a single-process iPhone like model. If one process is too many then I suspect we have a problem....
The iPhone has plenty of background apps and tasks. There are dozens of them running at any given time in every iPhone. They are all from Apple of course.
In my view not allowing third party background apps is just one more of the ways Apple wants to limit what developers can do on the iPhone, in order to give themselves the exclusivity on certain types of applications. And when it fails the NDA banhammer is always ready.
From a technical level there is absolutely no reason to disallow background apps. The post I've linked in my name, here in this comment, is a technical comparison of all the mayor smartphone platforms from a technical point of view. My conclusions were that only PalmOS is limited by its architecture, and that all the other platforms support background apps and some of them go out of their way to integrate them into the OS. All of them, except the iPhone.
Of course, the Blackberry has always supported background apps.
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