Why the iPad and the iPhone don't support multitasking

&#62; "Both the iPad and iPhone, as mobile devices, have limited memory (256MB in the current incarnations) and no hard drive. No hard drive means no swap file."<p>He loses me here. My iPhone has a 32GB SSD hard drive. Sounds like a perfect medium for swap space to me...

<i>Apple says they do not support multitasking because it is a hamper to stability and a drain on battery life. That clearly isn’t true—the iPad has plenty of processing power and battery capacity. Rumor is that Apple is going to add multitasking in a future OS release. This rumor likely is true. Is Apple somehow going to make background applications not consume any battery? Of course not. These excuses are straw men.</i><p>Actually this argument is a straw man. Apple can't make background processes run for free contrary to the laws of thermodynamics. However they can limit the resources they can use through the right API. (Register functions with realtime constraints, and request a "level of service.")

Saving the state of an application and terminating it isn't multitasking... you can already do that on the iPhone, and indeed well written iPhone apps will be restored to exactly the state you left them.<p>I care about multitasking for things which actually need to do stuff in the background, like Pandora or IM clients.

So the android solution is for apps to serialize their state when they are about to be terminated? That's exactly what iPhone apps are expected to do! What we are really talking about here is backgrounding, which is really only appropriate for a small class of apps. Push solves a lot of these cases. The audience for backgrounding without push is mostly power users, and they can jailbreak for that.

I have mult-tasking because I jailbroke.<p>Just as he says, Skype keeps getting killed when it's in the background so I can't depend on it for getting calls.

Of course there is the official Apple solution.<p><a href="http://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/2010/03/wozniak-carries-two-iphones-to-fix.html" rel="nofollow">http://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/2010/03/wozniak-carries...</a>

The only issue I take here is the iPhone is supposed to not need an instruction manual, everything is supposed to be intuitive. Adding multitasking like the Android means every user becomes an accountant keeping track of what's running and what should be killed. Activity or task managers are most definitely not intuitive. Most apps don't have any business running in the background, saving and resuming states seems to work in most cases especially with smart use of push notifications.<p>I've really only seen a couple compelling use cases and that is Pandora (basically music running in the background for the uninitiated) and the YC Wakemate app. Anyone have any others that couldn't be solved with push?

I would be more than happy with no multitasking at all with one exception: sms.<p>And I'm pretty sure that if I include another two apps (safari and mail) on my exception list most people would be okay without multitasking.<p>I don't need a window manager, I need to focus on the app I'm using and the ability to reply (or send) sms and mails and check something on the web without quitting the current app.

We know from SDK snooping that Apple is working on third party multi-tasking so it's kind of a moot point. The only question is how they're going to do it. I think it's good to acknowledge that a mobile device with limited battery/resources has to multi-task differently than a traditional computer running an OS designed 20-30+ years ago.

This guy is just wrong: Apple OS has <i>turned off multitasking</i> for 3rd party apps to maintain battery life.<p>It fully supports it. This is a control situation, where Apple has decided "We want our devices to have good battery life more than we want to allow multitasking".

And in practice, its still wrong. The 3rd party repos have an app called Backgrounding that does precisely that... And no sdlowdown on most apps.