iPad / iPhone Multitasking Hack
I’ll bet this isn’t what you’re looking for, but . . .
NEWS FLASH: The iPhone OS that runs iPod Touch, iPhone and the newly released iPad already does multitasking. Anyone who continues to suggest it doesn’t–is an idiot.
Why? Well, I can listen to music, surf the Internet AND take an incoming phone call, get IM message updates, etc. This means that ALL of these components are running simultaneously; i.e. the OS is multitasking the applications. THUS, the iPhone OS is not only capable of multitasking, it does it.
If you want to persist in saying it doesn’t prove me wrong. And I’m not looking for “well I can’t run Pandora in the background”. That’s really irrelevant. Prove to me that the iPhone OS doesn’t do multitasking and THEN, we’ll talk about what it doesn’t *allow*.
Speaking of Pandora–Pandora and Skype seem to be the most talked about applications that require multitasking support. Really? You want to stream Pandora on your iPhone? Maybe you should have just sprung for a bigger iPhone and put some music onto it instead of filling it with porn. It’s a friggin’ iPod. Plus, really, what kind of battery life do you get streaming Pandora on your phone? I know I can listen to the music on my iPhone for many, many hours without barely touching the battery, but I’ll bet streaming Pandora probably kills the battery in a few hours at best.
Skype? So, you want to spend the minimum $60/month for an AT&T cell phone so you can make free phone calls? Um, Ok. I suppose you have international friends that you need to stay in touch with via voice and don’t want to pay international phone rates. Once again, why use a phone as a phone when you have unlimited data bandwidth to chew up? And people wonder why AT&T service is so horrible in places like New York and LA–it has nothing to do with phone calls–it’s people streaming Pandora and using Skype. Not that I’m defending AT&T–it just points out that people don’t really think about what they are doing and the impact it might have on others.
The real proof that multitasking is a red herring for people who just want to find some major flaw in one of the most successful consumer electronics devices and mobile phones is highlighted in the recent iPhone OS 4.0 announcement. Apple announced that they were opening up the API’s to allow 3rd-party apps to multitask just like their own. In this case, things like Pandora can tie into the same services that the native iPod component uses; problem solved? Of course not–now everyone wants to complain that Apple is ‘controlling’ their ability and limiting it to only certain services. DUH! The reason this devices has been so popular is that, by and large, it simply works. It is one of the most stable devices out there and its performance is consistent. This didn’t happen accidentally–it’s entirely because Apple has limited how 3rd-party developers can interact with the OS.
This is the same reason people keep calling the iPhone OS a proprietary and closed system–because Apple won’t allow unrestricted access for people to do anything they want and put any code on the device. That’s funny–because there are literally thousands and thousands of third-party apps available–and this “limitation” doesn’t seem to stop a lot of people from making money selling them or a lot of users customizing their phones for their needs. Yes, I’ll agree that some of Apple’s decisions about which apps are allowed on the app store are completely out of line and total BS; BUT, the limitations they put on what those apps can do is perfectly reasonable. Some people just don’t like being told no; guess their parents must have been those dumb yuppies who thought ‘time outs’ were enough to raise socially responsible people. Nope–it just raises arrogant, self-centered idiots who think their ‘rights’ are more important than everyone else’s; but I digress. Yes, this would allow some innovations to happen more quickly–but at the risk of instability. The new “folder” feature in iPhone 0S 4.0 is a perfect example. This is a feature many “jail-broken” iPhones have had for a while; and, it did cause many people problems when it first came out. Now, all of us will be able to enjoy it, but only after it is much more stable, reliable and certainly less likely to break our device. This is what consumers need; they aren’t all as technically adept as many of us and don’t want to be.
In the end–if all you people who continue to persist that the iPhone does not multitask and is a “closed system” got your way–it would be exactly 1 day before every iPhone on the planet was consumed by viruses, locking up, shutting down and flat out not working. Not only is that bad for Apple–it’s bad for the general public who don’t care about what you think you should or shouldn’t be able to do–they just want a friggin’ phone that works. In my opinion, EVERY OS would be designed this way. No application would be able to get, or need, Ring 0. If that were the case–we’d have a lot less computer problems in the world and things would work a whole lot better.
Disagree? Figures.
Sounds like you aren’t open to considering a reasonable, alternative point of view, but I’ll give it a try anyway.
Ever try to run a navigation application on the iPhone only to receive a phone call? Navigon works great, but the second a call comes in it drops its state completely while you’re on the call. What if you’re listening to turn-by-turn navigation in the background and miss a turn because the call is riding on top of the navigation and shutting it down?
And then, restarting the application takes 20 to 30 seconds, not a mere flick of the finger as you bounce from the call back into a suspended (not closed and finished) app.
Ever experienced the frustration of using a ToDo app on the iPhone only to need to bounce quickly over to a browser window to investigate a product option, then when you go back to the ToDo app you need to start all over because the state isn’t saved?
That kind of thing may sound illegitimate to you, but that’s precisely the kind of back-n-forth product usage which Apple advertises heavily on TV.
Yes, the iPhone has “Apple-defined and restricted” multi-tasking now. If it’s Apple’s core suite (iPod, Safari, eMail) it multi-tasks. If it isn’t, then you’re tough out of luck.
That’s why I hacked my phone, jailbroke it, and enabled backgrounding the hard way. Now I bounce back and forth between apps like lightening and manage to keep application states intact every time I switch.
We’re not talking about Ring 0 access here, my friend. We’re talking about something that has been around since QEMM hacked DOS to permit the very same functionality nearly 20 years ago.
Yes, there are legitimate reasons why we’d want more multi-tasking than the Apple-app-only approach now leveraged on the iPhone. You may not believe that there is sentient intelligence in the universe beyond your own, but there is. And our beef with Apple over the lack of more inclusive multi-tasking is legitimate, not the mere whining of a bunch of ungrateful neanderthals.
Not at all. I love reasoned alternative points of view. If we all agreed, it would be a boring world.
You make some valid comments; however, no, I haven’t had your experiences.
Your To-Do app is flawed, first of all. Anyone who writes an iPhone app that doesn’t save state on exit should be taken out and shot; period. Every application that I use does so and I’d imagine that a great percentage of the apps available do as well. I have seen some apps that don’t and I don’t use them. This is a simple thing and only results from developers who don’t understand the environment they write in and/or are too lazy to do it right. Sure, blame Apple because some developer screwed up–we’ve been doing that to Microsoft for years. I’d find a new app; but that’s me.
As to the back-and-forth application usage demonstrated on TV, that’s exactly been my experience. I don’t recall them ever showing a GPS with turn-by-turn navigation but, I’ve taken calls on more than one occasion, switched to speaker, navigated the web or looked up a phone number and then SMS’d the number to the caller. And it’s been just as responsive as any add I’ve seen. Maybe I’m just lucky; but it seems to work for my wife as well.
Now, to the GPS . . . like the Pandora and Skype use cases, the API will be opened up in v4.0 of the iPhone OS to allow them to handle such situations. It is *still* not unlimited multitasking. My question is this: Will that satisfy you?
If not, then you can go ahead and jail-break your phone (as you’ve done) and do what ever you want, make it work however you wish and all without affecting the millions of other users who aren’t as savvy as you. You got what you want, why complain?
As to ring 0, I didn’t mean to suggest anything other than the fact that most of the people who continue to complain won’t be happy until they *do* have access to ring 0 AND they still will want Apple to support it. That’s who is being stupid; you can’t have it both ways. I’m just saying that if that happens, it will destroy the iPhone as a consumer device. It’s that simple. The fact that *you* jail-broke your phone tells me that you have some technical savvy, and thus, are *not* a general consumer. I’m talking about your mom or your grandmother/grandfather, etc. Or, I don’t know, the BILLIONS of other people on the planet.
So, reasoned alternative view? Sure. I’ll give you that you have some use cases, like a couple others before, that are reasonable requests that Apple is providing additional capability to solve. Given that you’ve apparently discontinued use of every consumer device you own (including dedicated GPS) in lieu of the iPhone, I could say you’re being a little greedy and ask if you want it to do your laundry too? But in the end, the very end, if you don’t like it and even jail-breaking it doesn’t give you what you want . . . go buy another device that does all these things for you, is mostly stable and has consistent performance. When you find it, drop me a line. (oh, and I’ve played with the Nexus One — better give it a couple software revisions).
While your writing style i do like quite a bit, this post really just kinda sucked. When both Jobs and TI (outsourced for chipset) noted that it was software disabled except for core functions – The ‘suite’ as you put it were labeled critical functions and run, as seperate emulated processes. Think of it like the BS when Windows integrated and forced down peoples throats IE. The ‘apps’ eg all the rest run at a different layer… you need to learn more about the actual build of hardware from the hardware to software… this stuff is running over the resource management layer at varying priorities. Plenty of primers on the internet and you sounded ill-knowlegable in this.. please return to normal or loose viewers!
I appreciate your compliments as well as the criticism.
That being said, since this discussion has degenerated into the nuances of task scheduling and priority, I assume that we can all agree then that the iPhone OS multitasks; otherwise there wouldn’t be anything to schedule or prioritize. Right?
Furthermore, I used the word ‘degenerate’ for a reason, albeit for the pun and not the original connotation. The whole point of the original post was to make a point with all the technophiles that the iPhone is a consumer device, not a geek toy. I guarantee you that if the average consumer doesn’t care about the nuances of multitasking, they really don’t care about the nuances of scheduling and prioritization.
So, while I’ll take the criticism, one of my professional roles is to make technology accessible to ‘normal’ people. You know, your mother, or significant other.
. Obviously, we need people like you who know all the fine details, but I hate to tell you that a majority of the world’s population really doesn’t care. For most of them, the iPhone is still the best, most reliable and cool device out there; unfettered multitasking and lower prioritization or not.