Tomorrow Apple will unveil the latest iPhone OS, version 4. The single biggest feature that may be announced tomorrow could be 3rd party application multitasking, something Android and the Palm WebOS have had for sometime now. Let's examine how Apple has gotten away without offering this so far.
Life Without Multitasking:
As we all know, the iPhone to date has never allowed developers to distribute apps in the App Store that have a background process. This means each time a user closes a third party app, that app's state is saved and the process is killed. And by killed I mean the memory and cpu resources that app required to run are released back to the iPhones OS and are ready to be reallocated to the next user request. That user request could be to open another app or check mail or whatever, but at the end of the day, all apps are loaded and run one at a time.
Continue reading iPhone OS4 Multitasking: Trade offs and Compromises.