Re: an app that never quits
Re: an app that never quits
- Subject: Re: an app that never quits
- From: Jens Alfke <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:27:54 -0700
On Sep 22, 2009, at 3:44 PM, Erick Calder wrote:
one final recourse of a solution for me: is there such a thing as
cron on the iPhone whereby I could schedule a bit of processing to
occur every x seconds?
No. The current policy on the OS is that 3rd party code does not
execute unless the user is visibly in that app.
I understand the concern for battery power, but to legislate daemons
out of existence on account of that seems silly since clearly one
can still write apps that drain power needlessly and users still get
to select which apps they install. I mean, it's not like there
isn't a whole community out there to arbitrate whether an app sucks
power.
I don't entirely agree with the policy, but I don't think it's
'silly'. I think you're falling into the classic engineer's mistake of
considering any problem you haven't personally worked on to be
trivial. :)
If an app's not visibly running, you as an end-user can't tell what
it's doing. If I install five apps and then my battery starts to go
dead after two hours, how do I know which one it was? Or maybe it was
some other app that got updated to a new version yesterday, or an app
that hasn't updated but its server changed something that's now
triggering a latent client-side bug...
The reducto-ad-absurdum example that's been given is the [alleged]
Task Manager UI in Windows Mobile. Apple doesn't want users to have to
grope through cryptic details of heap sizes and 'commit charges' to
figure out why their phone doesn't work.
To be honest, you kind of missed the big debate about this back in
2008 after the original SDK was released (and again when the push
notification service was announced.) You can probably google around to
find all the old threads on mailing lists and tech blogs.
—Jens_______________________________________________
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