With significant changes, major modifications as well as providing a huge number of APIs to third party developers, iOS 4 came out with a bang! But the feature that was the most awaited one and became immediately popular is without any doubt the Multitasking capability that iOS 4 offers for third party apps; meaning that you can now switch between apps without having to terminate any one of them.
Talking of Multitasking, Apple’s own applications have always been able to do that even with the previous version of their operating system. Now with iOS 4, third party apps are no longer the deprived class of apps; they can also make use of a limited set of multitasking capabilities.
A point slightly marring the overall news is that the level of multitasking being provided to third party apps won’t be what you get from Apple’s own apps. According to our resources, Apple has claimed that it allows for “certain functionality so that the OS can continue to preserve battery life and performance in a sane manner”. In other words, the third party apps won’t exactly be multitasking in the true sense of the word, but would in fact be performing a couple of tasks in the background.
According to ARS Technica, here’s what can be done with this functionality:
• Audio: you can now listen to streaming music from apps, like Pandora or newscasts through the NPR app, while doing other activities on your phone. Previously, you would have to quit out of the app (and therefore stop your music stream) if you wanted to respond to an SMS or read your e-mail, and now that’s no longer the case.
• VoIP: similarly, you can carry on Voice over IP calls on services like Skype without having to quit the app if you need to perform other tasks.
• Location: apps that need to poll your location, such as GPS and direction apps, will be able to do so in the background. No longer will you need to keep the app in the foreground just so it can keep track of where you are.
• Local notifications: third-party apps no longer have to rely solely on push notifications if they want to alert you of something on your phone. If you have an alert set in, say, one of Omni’s applications, it can ping you when the time comes instead of having to go through a convoluted series of Internet tubes to get to you. This, of course, reduces your reliance on an Internet connection to get certain types of alerts and helps cut down on overall wireless bandwidth.
• Complete tasks: if you start a task in an application and then switch to another one (such as downloading a new map in your favorite game), it can now complete the task in the background instead of forcing you to sit there and wait on it.
• Fast app switching: this is basically “pausing” an app where it is, which allows you to quickly switch away from it and then switch back, picking up where you left off.
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I think that it is just fair for Apple to put a limit to the level of multitasking that is available to third party apps developers, but one part of me is saying that they are insecure that a 3rd party app developer would be able to trump them in their game. Nevertheless, it would be nice for Apple to go ahead and open the capabilities of its new OS to other companies, that would give them greater apps in the long run! And greater apps would help market the iPhone!