Today, Apple held a special press event at its campus in Cupertino during which it revealed and demonstrated the new features that are going into the fourth version of the iPhone operating system. The company focussed on 7 ‘tentpole’ features, the most prominent of which is… Multitasking.
What?
Yes, they’re a little late to the party (Steve Jobs even admitted as such), but the day has finally come that you no longer need to jailbreak your iPhone or iPod Touch just to get multiple applications running at the same time. Apart from just allowing you to run multiple applications side-by-side, Apple will provide several APIs for developers to tap into, which allows applications to become multitasking aware; for instance, TomTom spoken directions while playing music, or Pandora music controls on the lock screen.
The interface for managing multiple running applications is relatively straightforward; pressing the Home button twice pulls up a dock from the bottom of the screen containing the icons of currently running applications. Apple also added an API for applications to save their state when they quit, and return right to where you started when you re-open them. As expected, multitasking will not be available on the iPhone 3G and second generation iPod Touch (they simply lack the power).
Another tentpole is a revamped email client. Taking cues from the competition, Apple has finally implemented a unified inbox, and you can now have multiple Exchange accounts. A threaded view has been added to Mail as well, which will certainly be a welcome addition for many (I never got the point, but hey, I’m weird).
Another major new feature is Folders. The iPhone has always been extremely clumsy when it came to managing all the icons on your home screens, making it hard to find the applications you needed. iPhone OS 4.0 will add the ability to create folders on the home screens. You can simply drag an application onto another, and it will automatically create a folder (which you can name). Tapping on that folder will open a pop-up displaying its contents. I am very, very, very happy my iPhone will get this feature. I’m not kidding.
Apple will also launch iBooks on the iPhone, which basically looks like a miniature version of iBooks on the iPad. Books you bought will appear across all devices, so you don’t have to fiddle with that. There are also several new enterprise features which should make the device more interesting in that setting (I’m not particularly well versed in that world, so I’ll just take their word for it).
The two remaining tentpoles are big ones. First, there’s Game Kit. It can best be described as Xbox Live for the iPhone – with the difference that this will arrive coming summer, while the actual mobile Xbox Live will arrive much later with Windows Phone 7. Game Kit will bring, among other things, achievements and leader boards.
Then there’s the seventh and final tentpole – the expected iAd mobile ad network. This really is a big one. The entire iAd portion of the presentation was a big middle finger towards Google and Adobe – there’s no other way to describe it. And you have to hand it to Apple; iAd looks pretty darn impressive.
Jobs lamented current ads in applications that yank you out of your application straight to an advertiser’s web page. Apple’s idea is different: the advertisement is completely interactive, and you remain within the application. You can embed videos, games, and a whole load of other things. It’s a bit difficult to describe, so here’s an example: Jobs showed an ad for Toy Story 3, and from within the ad, you could use the location framework to find a nearby cinema which plays the film.
Jobs reiterated the ads are made using HTML5 (the finger to Adobe), while also being clear to mention that search has not happened on phones; applications have (the finger to Google). Rest assured that at the end of the year, iAd’s competitors can close up shop when it comes to the iPhone. Oh, Apple delivers a 60/40 split, with developers taking the 60.
When?
iPhone OS 4.0 will be delivered to the iPhone 3GS and third generation iPod Touch this summer, while the iPad version will hit in autumn.
I have to say – I’m impressed, and I can’t wait for version 4.0 to hit my iPhone. While I’m particularly interested in multitasking, Folders are a very welcome addition as well. I am disappointed, though, that we’ll still be stuck with those archaic and annoying modal dialogs (no new notification system) and there won’t be a proper home screen, either.
Overall, it looks like a very worthwhile upgrade that takes some of Android, some of webOS, some of the jailbreak community, stirs it a little, and calls it version 4.0.
I thought all the iPhone fans told us we didn’t need multitasking? Man, I sold my Droid because the multitasking was unneeded and eating all my battery or something.
</sarcasm>, BTW.
It’s not real multitasking. It’s a freeze/unfreeze feature and a bunch of background daemons. Apple focused on the user experience, knowing that faux multi-tasking will serve the vast majority’s needs without any draw backs. Real geeks don’t matter to Apple, that much should be apparent already.
Everything in the announcement was exactly as I expected, Apple are iterating. The real surprises were the decent multi-tasking UI, and game center. No way did I see that. Apple are changing expectations of mobile gaming and Microsoft are nowhere to be seen in this space and Nintendo are pig-headed, over charging and very, _very_ slow to get with social networking and internet play.
Oh, and a computing platform where there can be no ad-blockers. Great, isn’t it?
Edited 2010-04-08 18:43 UTC
Microsoft is nowhere to be seen..except that whole Windows Phone 7 XNA game development with XBox Live integration.
You know, the exact thing Apple did with OS4..except it’s XBox Live..
Apple’s multitasking implementation makes sense, it’s a kitchen sink approach which will work well for the majority of situations.
So, what’s the shipping date of Windows Phone 7? How many Zunes have they sold exactly? Nowhere to be seen. They have some ground to catch up. It is possible though, the XBox 360 is Microsoft’s ace card, and Apple don’t have a console to interoperate with. *cough*Pippin*cough*.
Has Apple added any gaming capability to the Apple TV? It seems like the iPhone/iPad/iTouch are natural controllers for such a device. Play the game at home and take the mobile version with you out the door…
Catching up with the iPad is too late, because Apple are already working on the next thing. I wouldn’t put it past Apple to enter yet another market in two to three years—build up a big app + developer base, and then make a move into TVs or consoles and know all the content will quickly move and update with them.
Apparently you can use iphone/ipads with the ipad scrabble game over bluetooth for letter tiles
Fall 2010. With an SDK already out there.. so essentially in the same boat as Apple. The XNA development community is absolutely massive, and the ecosystem is already there..with superior programming languages and development tools.
XBox Live is also pretty big, especially with the gamerscore/achievement fanatics. It’s definitely a lure.
If you think this Apple ecosystem is going to take off over night then you’re wrong. XBox Live though, is an already established platform with a ton of subscribers with another ton of build up points and achievements.
Microsoft has the many screen advantage over Apple, which reaches more than even the iPad. Xbox 360, Surface, ZuneHd, and Windows can all share the majority of their code.
It’s definitely a force to be reckoned with.. I’m not sure why you would try to downplay it. Apple’s announcement is important and significant regardless..
I don’t. That’s what’s different I think. Apple know they are the small player here. Just as with the iPhone, they’ve let the market speak, and just built up presence over time. Apple know they have no ability to beat the XBox 360’s well polished system, but they do know that they have a metric ton of apps and even more developers churning out new ideas for their platform.
Give it another two years and Apple and Microsoft will definitely be head to head in the gaming space. Microsoft will have the edge with the XBox anchor, but Apple will have a tricksy handheld that’s far more compelling that what they have. Remember, WinPho7 is just catching up with iPhone v1 / 2, let alone v4, 5, …
And just where in the world in the Zune and the Surface sold to the great unwashed?
Certainly not in Europe.
What about Asia
What about S. America
What about Africa
“without any drawbacks”? i do not know you to be an apple apologist or a fanboy walking the partly line.
“real geeks” these days seem to be people who want features apple doesnt provide in their current iteration of their products.
and what will you way when they provide “real” multitasking in the future”? let me guess, the definition of “real geeks” will be redifined to sync up with apple tune again ..
Maybe when you see the fuel cell version of the iPhone/iPad/iTouch you’ll see full third party multitasking. Until Apple decides that battery life is a non-issue, (however that conclusion is arrived at) you won’t be seeing it.
I’m not Gruber, and I don’t turn on a dime. Apple focused their efforts on what will work for the vast majority without chewing through battery or requiring a task manager. Only geeks who know how software works will see this as not good enough.
Oh, and I just released an update to Video for Everybody for iPad compatibility. And I didn‘t need Apple’s permission to do so. Rock on open ’Web.
i cant help it wondering what you would have said if you did require their permission to do so.
Edited 2010-04-08 19:40 UTC
What’s even more important as a dev is determinalistic program termination. When memory pressure builds in Android/WM6 you never know who’s on the chopping block.
real geeks are people that dont want to buy a gadget if they can’t install a full linux distro on it. Apples market are people who buy gadgets to do something specific, and focus on doing a really good job at that one thing.
As the previous owner of a smartphone that supported multitasking, it does kill battery life, and the 99% case is that i would end up killing all running apps every time I exited something. As a current iphone 3g owner, I can tell you that if you want to play a game and have a few safari tabs and mail running in the background, you probably will need to force quit those first.
I would love to see if multitasking would work on a nexus one with its dragonfly, but barring that, it is a terrible idea for mobile phones.
What apple is doing isn’t real multitasking, its basically faking it. By faking it, you get some benefits, but the costs are minimal.
“As the previous owner of a smartphone that supported multitasking…”
As the *current* owner of a smartphone that supports multitasking, it doesn’t affect battery life in any meaningful way. That is, I use the phone throughout the day with a variety of simultaneous apps, and plug it in overnight to recharge.
It’s really cool to watch programs updating side-by-side in the N900’s task view, too. 🙂
But Apple’s new faux-multi-tasking is certainly a major step forward from iPhone 3.
Same here, I must be using the best phone on the market, because it is like 4 years old (Sony Ericsson M600i) using a dead interface (UIQ), and it is able to multitask, never had a problem or error message because it is out of memory, I open a lot applications, Opera Mini included (Java based), and the task manager close the least used applications (that are well written to save its state)
Jobs “Some of the earlier hardware can’t support multitasking at all”, what my old phone can do it but and old iPhone can not? crazy right?
How about this, ‘real geeks’ want full root access to their phone with no artificial limitations on what it can do. Most people would never need root access of course but ‘real geeks’ want the ability to get it somehow. Thus they jailbreak and all that good stuff.
And I agree with Kroc that this version of multi-tasking will satisfy the vast majority of users needs on the iphone.
The iAd platform is the most interesting thing about this announcement to me. And I find many similarities between it and the iPad. In many ways the most revolutionary thing about them is the way apple was able to get publishers and content creators to follow Apple’s vision in lock step. iAd doesn’t introduce any new technology, something similar could be done currently on most any computer but it goes against conventional wisdom and now one did it, until Apple stepped in an said “Do this” To tell the truth I don’t think it will make me click on any more adds than I already do (zero) but I can still see how advertisers will love it no that apple showed them how. Its similar in many ways to publishers love affair with the iPad, it was possible to create web apps very similar to the ones everyone has been drooling over in the app store for a while. But they never tried until apple told them to do so. This is certainly helped along by the fact that everyone using these devices has a modern standards based browser inside, no crappy ie holding everything back. But part of it is the Apple RDF convincing people to do things a certain way and then calling it revolutionary. I would not go that far, its the standards themselves that are revolutionary but it is certainly an accomplishment.
I do admire many things that apple has done, but then they turn around and do crap like patenting cover flow and being one of the biggest control freaks in the business. So its hard to like them completely. In fact this dual identity makes me dislike them more than a company that I don’t care about at all. I think it would be better if Apple had someone to counter balance Steve Jobs with a more geeky outlook, since I believe some small accommodation could go a long way to rebuilding Apple’s geek cred, but that will never happen at this point. Apple is going to keep following St. Jobs until he retires.
Why would they change? The are more profitable and more popular then they have ever been….
Which is *exactly* what Android does. If you want your app to do something in the background you have to start a service (daemon); it can be killed as soon as it is non visible.
Try this: Open shazam, start tagging some music. Before it is finished open a web browser, and do some other stuff. Now go back to shazam. You’ll find that the tagging *didn’t* happen in the background because the app was stopped/killed.
While I’m not surprised that the first two generations aren’t going to be multi-tasking, except for Apple’s own applications, I’m reminded how an 8 MHz Motorola 68000 was running Version 7 UNIX. Still, Apple are making progress.
I’m sure someone will say that a hand held device requires the full gamut of multi-tasking, but if the user don’t miss it, what’s the difference (besides storage)?
It sounds as though they’ve gone a long way to find a contorted, yet efficient way to handle users’ needs and provide consistency in other areas.
The only thing I could truly want is a more modular way of updating the operating system, so that a few security updates don’t cause a 200+ MB download.
0. Don’t support Flash on your mobile platform
1. Introduce an ad-framework that requires ads to be in HTML5
2. Make it the dominant ad platform on the dominant mobile platform
3. Wait for advertisers to get tired of paying for development of Flash- AND HTML5-ads when HTML5-ads work fine in any enviroment that supports Flash
4. Profit
Boom, roadblock. Mobile internet is still minute compared to the real deal. Very small market. For now, at least.
It’s the one market with people willing to and capable of spending money, and the one market where ad-blockers won’t come to the user’s rescue.
That might be good enough for it to become a small, but “reasonably” priced market to advertise on.
If you kept up with live blogging on one of the other sites and you were paying attention, iAd addresses the reality that for the mobile realm, it’s in-app ads that have the command, and search is pretty much nothing for the total amount of time users are potentially exposed: search just isn’t where it’s at for mobile devices and advertising revenue! 100 million devices with an average of 30 minutes of app use a day, with an ad every 3 minutes== 1 billion ads served on iPhoneOS devices, EACH DAY. That’s nothing to sneeze at, and, chances are, most people on a mobile device aren’t browsing the web enough and doing searches for that to be the majority of their possible ad exposure.
Second roadblock. Desktop ads still have to support older versions of IE – this means no HTML5 (at least until IE9 is the new dominant standard – in 8 years).
HTML5 is truly magnificent, and I can wait to start using it. By the time we can ditch legacy IE compatibility, Flash will have newer features that we’ve all come to rely on (if Adobe keeps innovating – and I have to be honest, Adobe has slowed that horse, compared with how fast Macromedia used to roll out new useful features), and HTML5 will be behind again.
Hopefully Adobe knows the value of Flash is less the player, and more the production tools – I make things in Flash because it’s faster, easier, and cheaper. With an HTML5 publish target, I’d be happy to continue using their tools – and frankly, HTML5 has no tools support right now (except arguably Dreamweaver, which is actually an HTML4 tool, and it also put out by Adobe).
This is true.
Adobe can just add things to Flash and its done. It takes an act of congress to add stuff to HTML.
Adobe added peer to peer and chatroulette appeared out of nowhere. Now just think how long it would take for HTML5 to add peer to peer, audio input, and video input. Now think how long it would take for someone to implement a working version of something chatroulette-like. It would probably take something like that team of google employed experts that got Quake running on HTML5. Not saying its un-doable; just saying making applications in HTML5 seems very very hacky.
Thats the thing, it is a space that is growing exponentially right now. Mobile video platforms are probably right up there with selling virtual goods in social games as business models that are pretty much guaranteed to get you funding at the moment.
5. Watch other carriers offer Flash without any problems
http://phandroid.com/2010/04/01/speed-test-flash-vs-html5-on-the-ne…
I really don’t like Flash but I also know it isn’t going anywhere. By the time HTML5 has widespread support Flash will be far better than it is today.
If double-clicking home brings up the multitasking UI, how do I get to the phone? I currently use the double tap to get to my phone ALL THE TIME.
I hope Apple didn’t forget that this device is also supposed to be a phone.
Silly Adam, Apple don’t make money on the phone calls
Am I alone, in not wanting ads in apps? The world that apple is portraying is increasingly one I want to avoid. But, if they succeed in killing flash, I guess it won’t be a total loss.
My money is still on android to steam roll iphones. Unless, that anticipated admoney is used to subsidise the device price, and they diversify away from at&t.
It will be interesting to see iAd and how it ruins the “experience.” If I have to click through to get to the app, I won’t be happy. With the revenue this could potentially create, I wonder if the price of ad-less apps will go up?
They are not making in-app adds mandatory. They are just providing a competing mobile ad framework for advertisers and developers. So, the developers that would have put ads that take you out of your app and into Safari can opt for a less obtrusive way to generate revenue. I consider this an improvement.
Android isn’t there yet. 2.2 is really close, but it is still a rougher experience then the iPhone. Also, app developers have to target multiple platforms with different capabilities with android, on iPhone, they are all pretty much the same. Combine that with the fact that the iPhone got there first, and it explains why there are so many more (and better quality on average) apps in the appstore right now.
That being said, android was absolute garbage a year and a half ago, so it is moving extremely fast. That is also pushing apple forward, I don’t think anyone was expecting v4 for another year or two. It will be very interesting to see how it plays out over the next couple of years, but I think its a bit early at this point to put money down on one side or the other.
Well, that’s why they call it a bet
iAds sounds like the worst nightmare ever.
Exactly right. I will NEVER use apps with ads embedded in them, but I would be willing to pay for a version without ads, assuming the app is useful to me.
So, if any iPhone/iPad developers are reading this, PLEASE offer paid versions of your apps along with the ‘free’, ad-supported ones.
I really hope they will keep ads to free apps, as they’re doing now: lite/free versions tend to be full featured but ad supported, while paid versions are ad free — but color me royally pissed off if I ever get to see an ad in a paid app!
RT.
One problem with iAds that I didn’t realise is that those ads look a hell of a lot more difficult and expensive to make – no problem for big advertisers, but small companies might still stick with more static, single-image solutions.
On top of that, as cool as the iAd ads look, they are a lot more annoying and space-consuming than those simple and very small static image ads we have now.
In a recent thread, someone posted that the iPad and current generation iPhones wouldn’t get multitasking, because they didn’t have enough RAM:
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?417058
I’d like to think that was all in jest
I am disappointed that the first generation devices (and all with 128 MB RAM, not sure about the second gen iPod Touch RAM amount) aren’t getting multitasking, and… oh yeah, it seems the first gen iPhone and iPod Touch aren’t getting iPhoneOS 4.0 at all (BUMMER!) and Apple’s statement that the hardware couldn’t do it… rang a little off to me
But, hey, most phones don’t get long-term support, at least not before Apple upset the… applecart! So, I guess they’d love to see people upgrade to the next hardware sooner or later.
The other thing that, if I’m reading things correct, is not supported is running general purpose types of apps with a background presence: that is, if it doesn’t work with one of the background services (voIP, audio, some others) it’ll still need to rely on push notifications and all that’s involved there, so IM and IRC, for example, are still… limited. I guess that’s one of those usability/engineering decisions for tradeoffs of battery life and user complexity, like it or not!
I’m not sure that the multitasking they are talking about will even be good enough for IRC/IM. They are talking about saving the app state into memory, and waking up something different. It wont actually be running in the background all the time, but it will allow you to be in the middle of a monopoly game, switch to adding a contact, then go back to monopoly very fast without quitting anything.
Features versus Experience.
I’m a real geek, and I love my iPhone. Because I want a phone, not a hobby.
Now, I like to tinker. I like to play, break, and ruin equipment. But my phone? I travel a lot for my job, and my phone is my life line. iCal tells me when I need to make conference calls, Mail App connects to Gmail which has folders with my various itineraries and hotel reservations, and the camera app snaps photos of all my receipts to send in for expense reports. I pay my bills with various bank apps and Safari, check balances, and make more travel reservations. I even have an SSH client for when I need to do some quick command line work from the road. Add to that games, music, and podcasts to get me through downtime on long plane rides and airport lounges.
So the last thing I want to do is make my phone a hobby. I need a reliable tool.
Most of what you normally consider “multitasking” is already in the iPhone. When I close out of a game, check email, and load the game back up, it doesn’t take any longer than starting it fresh, and most games will resume you where you left off. That gives me all the same benefits of multi-tasking, without having a CPU-hungry application spinning cycles and draining the battery in the background. True multi-tasking? No, of course not. But I don’t care. Why would I, other than to be pedantic?
My WinMo phone from 2006 had multi-tasking, but it was awful. I had a task manager, and sometimes I’d forget I had 20 apps open, and have to go in and kill them all manually. And sometimes they didn’t die, I had to reboot my phone. Meanwhile these frozen apps were stuck in a loop draining my battery. Multitasking? Sure. Do I want that experience? No way.
It can do more now, but still you won’t be able to run a torrent client in the background AFAICSI, which might be something you want to do on your Ipad.
Calling the thing IphoneOS is smart, because people don’t mind when their phone can’t do certain things, but if phone OSes are the future of computing that really has to change.
http://blog.rlove.org/2010/04/iphone-os-4-and-multitasking.html
Lets hope Google sues over multi-tasking
Lets hope Microsoft sues over Game Kit.
Apple has patented both areas. Try again.
iADs? Say it ain’t so! I guess since the iPhoneOS is a closed platform, Users will have no say on these Rich Ads sucking precious AT&T 3G bandwidth.
Users that aren’t idiots will pay for paid apps without ads, if they don’t want ads using their bandwidth, and those that don’t feel like paying for an app will use the ad-supported apps, either because they find the ads less intrusive than the fact of having to pay cash for something they want/need, or perhaps they want to try out the application before buying it.
If you want truly free apps, write the damned things yourself: otherwise, you either need to pay cash to get the apps, or you need to pay bandwidth and the real or perceived inconvenience (Granted, it does make a GUI more cramped to account for persistently-visible ads, if they’re done that way_ of the presence of ads in apps, because, ultimately, if developers aren’t paid, unless they do things purely for fun or out of the goodness of their own hearts and wallets (time is money, and it takes lots of time to become a proficient developer) they’ve got to pay the bills: there’s no such thing as a free lunch, or app, for that matter.
I wouldn’t normally correct something so trivial but your recent posts on English grammar invite corrections.
The phrase isn’t “Steve Jobs even admitted as such“, but “…as much“.
🙂
“Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).”
This rules out not only Flash, but Unity and other game engines available for the IPhone, why is Apple even doing this?!?!
If they want to make cash they have to choose between C++, ObjC or ObjC++ instead of C#.
Clearly, Apple has plains to build a standard Gaming API set of frameworks.
And it sure as hell isn’t going to cost like Unity charges for their kits:
* Basic: $399 per seat
* Advanced: $1,499 per seat (requires Unity Pro)
MonoTouch is, what, $299? Many BETA testers almost fainted when the pricing was released. That is all on top of the $99 developer account as well. This stuff shouldn’t necessarily be *free*, but it should also not gouge the developer.
The price of Unity is partly so high because Novell tries to charge a big fee for the use of the Mono runtime. Apparently, the MonoTouch version is the “cheapest they have ever licensed it for”. That surely speaks volumes?
This also rang stupid to me, this kills off a whole legion of apps on the App Store.
How the hell do they even detect this in the first place?
Great question.
Software is full of compatibility layers. Thats like saying your compatibility layer must link directly against our compatibility layer with no 3rd party compatibility layers between.
How will Apple enforce it – either by requiring source code for review or disassemble. In case of the latter, the app code and statically linked library can still be obfuscated.
Also they could ban on noticing that the app is released for another platform. After banning an app just because description mentioned Android, I wouldn’t really be surprised.
Apple adds functionality, in some clever ways, and still people slam them.
Meanwhile they continue to make minor improvements here and there that people USING THEIR PRODUCTS eat up because it makes sense and makes their computing lives that much easier… but god forbid they mention it or get excited by it and someone yells FANBOI!
What I find interesting in all this is that it arrived AFTER iPad… which means there was some sort of internal turmoil going on before iPad was released. I can imagine the tension: Steve: “is my damn OS 4 ready yet?!? You know I have to go on stage in 3 days and everyone is going to bitch and whine that the iPad has no multitasking!” LOL
Apple will be hosting and delivering the ads. I would guess that they will limit the size of the ads so they won’t hog too much bandwidth. Nothing more annoying that waiting for a page to load because some third-party ad server is overloaded. Using HTML should keep them relatively small as well. Ads are a necessary evil unless you’re willing to pay. There are ads on this site as I type this. But being Apple, there will likely be guidelines for what is or isn’t acceptable. Apple doesn’t want to completely ruin the user experience. In a way, it’s quite smart of them to take control in this area.
And you can bet Google will now be offering a similar service for Android apps.