You know I totally understand Apple’s decision to limit the iPhone’s multitasking of 3rd party apps. Battery technology has not kept up to even 1/100th of the Moore’s law rate of technological advancement that chip tech enjoys. Current 3G/4G chipsets, along with the associated Bluetooth stack, are battery drains. And you cannot tack a fat-ass battery to the iPhone and fsck around with the all important Apple product aesthetics.
Product design is all about balancing constraints, to extract maximum benefit for the vast majority of the target audience. So 80% of iPhone users want all-day battery performance. <1% of the iPhone Digerati demand background Pandora audio streaming. Of course Apple is going to design for the masses, damned the rabid geekboys and the “i want to run QIK, Pandora and Apache on my iPhone simultaneously while surf the net and Skyping to my buddies now” crowd. So of course Apple’s is going to cater to the vast majority.
But having played with assorted varieties of the Android phones in the last few weeks, I must admit it is indeed useful to have a limited number of 3rd party apps running in the background, especially music streaming apps like Pandora. I think Apple needs to relook this aspect of the iPhone perhaps for the future generation of iPhone models. Surely Apple has enough engineering talent to improve their battery power management technology (perhaps that’s why they bought PA semi) to allow some form of limited 3rd party apps multitasking. Perhaps hardcode the number of 3rd party apps that can be multitasked (call them apps slots), and initially limit them to perhaps to only 2 apps running simultaneously (one in the foreground and one in the background). Despite the platform limitations of Android (fragmentation, VM limitations, poor hardware abstraction layer drivers, increasing OS version disparity rates ,etc), the Android platform will increasingly become a short to mid term threat because of their superior 3rd party apps management. Apple should not discount the importance of this feature.
