I finally ended up buying an iPhone (but I still also use my HTC Touch Diamond) and so far I am very happy with my purchase. But as with any Apple product you have to accept that their products are limited – what they do, they do fantastically well! But there are always things that you end up missing…

..such as background processes. I can have 6-7 programs open on the HTC TD without any problems. So, why can I only have one open on the iPhone? Apparently, it kills the battery life. 80% lower battery life seems high, but that was the number mentioned by Apple.

But ok, I can live with that – that’s the price you pay for using Apple products (this is not a negative statement, it’s just a fact). What I can’t understand, however, is why they didn’t come up with an alternative solution?

An alternative solution
If I can come up with a solution, I’m sure Apple’s engineers also could. Why not just allow programs to enter a state where they are allowed to run a small amount of code once an hour? I don’t think people will want to calculate Pi with 100 digit precision or do 3D rendering… What I want is simply to allow TwitterFon to check for new tweets every hour, the Facebook app to check for new notifications, the Google Reader to let me know of news, my soccer score app to check for any goals etc.

I haven’t done any programming for the iPhone (or Mac), but I assume it would be quite simple to do this! I imagine the following…

1. The program is required to implement a method containing code to check for updates
2. The application registers itself to the iPhone OS
3. The program requests to run in the background, user approves (editable from the settings)
4. The iPhone OS runs the method once every x minutes, allowing it to update the application icon

The method implemented could be checked by Apple before adding it to the app store or just set a limit for the number of CPU cycles available for that method (based on the connection speed).

I wonder why this isn’t the case..? Am I missing something?