Apple recently announced iPhone OS 4.0 enabling “multitasking” of a sorts. I want to dig slightly deeper into understanding what they actually mean by this “multitasking”, without talking too much about the nitty gritty details.
There are 7 kinds of “services” they expose for multitasking:
- Background Audio
- Voice over IP
- Background Location
- Push Notifications
- Local Notifications
- Task Completion
- Fast App Switching
Among all 7 “services” exposed, 6 of them are somewhat already available in the system itself, one way or another, with hidden APIs not exposed for public developer usage. Let’s take a look at each of them, and how they might “save battery” without “slowing down the system”.