11 months after iOS 4.0, 31% of apps don’t multitask [App File Stats]

The article only analyzes free apps, so there is definitely going to be some selection bias here. Many apps (especially most free ones) would not have any use for multitasking anyhow.

I don't enable multitasking in my apps because I'm worried the bugs will accumulate in a long-running instance, and many users don't necessarily know to restart the app. I am planning to add component-by-component restart logic and trigger it periodically before enabling multi-tasking.

I'm curious what their definition of "multitasking" is... To begin with, iOS doesn't really support multitasking in the general sense of the word. You can save application state when the app moves into the background and restore when the app comes back into the foreground, but, in general, there's no way to run two apps at once. So, in essence, if you compile with a newer SDK, you've effectively implemented "multitasking" by conforming to the new APIs. As others have pointed out, though, there are a lot of apps for which there is no need for "multitasking" in that sense. So, is their definition apps which explicitly save state or something else? To me, it sounds like a relatively meaningless statistic. The more interesting statistic is the percentage of apps built with old SDKs...

Interesting how most developers prefer to have their icons left as-is. That shine doesn't seem too popular.

Who cares? Why do most applications need to multi-task? What interesting discussion is there to be had about this topic?

Are there any statistics regarding the penetration of iOS 4.0 compared against an earlier version?<p>Are there compatibility issues [i.e. if i built against an older version, would that run on the latest version of iOS]? If not, why would people have to rebuild? I'm specifically looking at this statistic: "186 apps were built with pre-4.0 sdks"

In the iOS games we made, we opted out explicitly. The games weren't ones that people would quit and relaunch with great frequency, so it made sense to just not bother. By the time they relaunched it, it probably would have been terminated in the meantime by the OS anyway, just due to normal use of other apps.

Some apps don't really need multitasking. I have a few apps that I would be annoyed to run in the background.

Sounds about right to me. I would think for things like games targeted to kids resume-state would actually not be a desirable feature.

or 69% of apps do multitask.

I reckon that most developers don't bother to update their apps once it's in the store. They make their initial $0.99 and leave it as is. There might be the occasional bug fix if they find their ratings drop, but that's it.

Sad really.<p>Recompile (current XCode).<p>Resubmit.<p>Multitasking!

I am surprised.<p>Only two or three of the apps installed on my iPod would have any use for multitasking. Besides not being that useful, multitasking limits you to iOS 4 devices and there are lots of iOS 3.x devices out there.