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Home » Smartphones

There’s a bad spot on the Apple …

Posted by Jack Cook on March 8, 2008 – 6:27 pm  Share
closeThis post was published 1 year 8 months 15 days ago.
It\'s is possible that the information within this article is now out of date or updated.

spot … and it appears it’s the iPhone SDK!  Guess what? There are No Background Processes!

Robert Balousek has found some interesting spots appearing on this Apple product.  As he got beyond the shine there is a very important detail that he discovered; namely that only one iPhone application can run at a time.  And what is worse is that third-party applications will NOT run in the background.

So what does that mean?  If you’re running an application and the phone rings … you lose!!  The app you were running closes!

Robert found some very interesting facts in the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines PDF

Robert explained it like this:

If you are running an application such as AOL Instant Messenger on your iPhone, everytime you receive a call or browse away from the application you would be signed out, you would lose any unread messages, and your conversations would end.

Check out the piece by Robert Balousek here.

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  • bollin
    I really think this will be fixed. The only reason why the SDK was released was because enough people complained. I think if enough people complain about the lack of background processes, this will change also.

    Also, The "no background processes"only appears to be a design guideline and not an absolute technical limitation: See this link:

    http://www.macrumors.com/2008/03/08/iphone-sdk-...
  • edge777
    This is quite odd, too bad Apple does this stuff (and I'm a fan). How about all the apps that are out there right now (not the official ones) - are they able to run in the background?
  • SteveGavJR
    This is no surprise to me. Everyone knew from the start that apple was going to put limitations on their sdk. That's why apple products work so well. Rather than leave the operating system open to problems from the software, they cripple the software so it can't really affect the os. The logic is there. They're covering themselves against claims that the iphone doesn't work well because the user installed a program that is crappy and it hosed their system. This basically makes it so ANY software you installed doesn't bother the core functionality of the iphone.

    In my opinion, this is good AND bad. It's good because it ensures that the iphone will almost always work up to spec. It's also a bad thing because it renders most mobile apps useless.
  • Haesslich
    Well, that'll screw it as far as custom apps go for business. I mean, if you made a custom interface for a certain application to work... and the program closed while you were working because you had to field a call? Oops.

    I wonder how THIS will go over with business; sure, it'll sync with Exchange via ActiveSync, but... well, it's sorta like having a Palm-based phone, but at least the Palm-based phone didn't kill the app when you had to open up the other one or take a call; it just suspended it, rather than close the application out.
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