Linked by Hadrien Grasland on Fri 15th Apr 2011 10:24 UTC
Ever since iPhoneOS (now iOS) has been released, there's an old fight going on about how multitasking should work on personal computers, and more specially what should happen to applications which are put in the background. Some advocate that they should be dipped in virtual liquid nitrogen and stop doing anything, like on iOS, which others advocate that they should continue to run in the background, like on desktop OSs. What about putting a little more flexibility in there?
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 04/29/13 21:06 UTC
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Of course they eat lots of power ! They need a network connection to be permanently on in order to work, how could it work another way ? Those applications simply cannot work without true multitasking, so it's unfair to blame multitasking here, it's as if you were comparing battery life when making phone calls with standby battery time and concluded that phone calls' power consumption sucks, it's just not right.
That being says, your "keep closing apps" nightmare does show that the way many phones manage apps is broken. The "let's put everything in the background as a default setting" philosophy is just wrong, because it encourages wasting resources. If you don't need an app, you should close it. If closing apps is not intuitive, it's a design failure. Switching between opened tasks should be the exception, not the default.
Edited 2011-04-15 19:42 UTC