Background Apps Can Help iPhone Compete
The announcement of Google’s Nexus One phone combined with the pressure from Droid and other touchscreen technologies may finally have the iPhone worried, if not on the run.
So what could Apple do to quickly show that its iPhone is not going to let anyone see it sweat? There’s a pretty simple answer, if Apple is willing to do it.
Allow third-party applications to run in the background.
Recent ads for the iPhone celebrate the fact that you can continue a phone call while searching the Web for restaurant reservations and buying flowers online. Sure, you can do that – as well as playing iTunes music while doing other activity on your phone.
But if instead of iTunes, you prefer to listen to Pandora, then you’re stuck. You can’t do any other activity on your phone and hear Pandora’s tunes at the same time since Apple restricts third-party applications from running in the background.
Since you can do that on the Android and the Palm Pre, Apple has finally found themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
But Apple’s own development guidelines seem staunchly rooted in keeping the third-party apps out of the background, even if it means inconvenience for its users:
“Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits. It’s important to make sure that users do not experience any negative effects because of this reality. In other words, users should not feel that leaving your iPhone application and returning to it later is any more difficult than switching among applications on a computer.”
The blogging community is pining for this change to be made by Apple – and if a Google phone comes along with more muscle and background apps running, they may bolt.
“Background apps. From Twitter, to IM and VoIP apps (that are simply impractical to use with just PUSH), background apps are a must have,” wrote one blogger on Monday.
Whether this comes with a next generation version of the iPhone will be interesting to see, especially if an iPhone 4.0 is already floating around.
What is an easy step Apple can take to stave off the impending Google phone wave? Allow users to run apps in the background.
