Jobs: Performance Issues Kept iOS 4 Background Wallpaper From iPhone 3G

John Brownlee ()

Jobs: Performance Issues Kept iOS 4 Background Wallpaper From iPhone 3GWondering why your iPhone 3G didn’t get background wallpapers? So was Gizmodo reader Erica, who rattled off an email to Steve Jobs with a request for an explanation.

Jobs’ response? Backgrounds on the 3G just didn’t meet their performance standards. But there’s a little more going on here.

Erica’s email to Jobs read:

Hey Steve! I just upgraded my iPhone 3G to iOS 4 and was really looking forward to setting a background on my home screen. Guess that’s not happening, but I’d like to know why.

See, I get why you don’t include multitasking. My iPhone gets pretty hot when certain apps run, couldn’t imagine how multitasking would fry my phone.

But the background thing, I don’t see how that would be memory intensive and/or battery draining. It doesn’t seem like that feature needs to be exclusive to the 3GS and 4G.

Jobs’ response:

The icon animation with backgrounds didn’t perform well enough.

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This explanation isn’t likely to make a lot of sense to iPhone and iPod Touch users who have had background wallpapers on their jailbroken devices for years thanks to Winterboard. Clearly, even the first-gen iPhone has the horsepower to run a background wallpaper without significantly impacting performance.

The difference here, though, is in execution. Noting that some background wallpaper images can make it hard to see icon text and even icon apps, Apple chose to put a drop shadow for each icon and its label… something Winterboard doesn’t do. Hence the extra overhead.

Frankly, if you have an iPhone 3G or iPod Touch 2G, I wouldn’t get too excited about Apple’s omission here: a working jailbreak for iOS 4 is right around the corner, and Winterboard should bring background wallpapers to older legacy devices just as well as it ever did.

10 comments »

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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  • Jesse

    I jailbroke my iPhone 3G with the GM release of iOS4, turned homescreen wallpaper on and indeed the backdrops made the animations and springboard a lot slower. Then again, so does Winterboard. Multitasking works fine though ;)

  • Kyle

    Is there a way that I can Jailbreak my iPod Touch 2g to be able to do multitasking? I know it probably won’t work.

  • Rodrigo

    Jailbreaking sucks! I trully regret… I did it on my iPod Touch once, and it’s got A LOT of bugs…
    Better stick with the original stuff IMO…

  • http://www.nimbling.com Herman

    :P @ Rodrigo: If you suck at jailbreaking, it’s advised to stay away from it, indeed ;)

  • Nick

    I love how apple makes up whatever they want to explain their feature limiting to make you buy new phones and nobody cares. My jailbroken 3G runs every “Feature”, both multitasking and wallpapers, and has been running them perfectly fine for nearly a year now. Way to keep up with the jailbrake people. Maybe Apple should hire some of the jailbrake coders so they can actually come out with a feature first.

  • Tricky

    I’ve had m 3G jailbroke for 2 years now and it does everything the iPhone 4 will then some I love playing snes games on my phone I also think they should just hire geo hott the original founder of jailbrake since thier is a forum on how he might of found a way to permanently jail break the phones…….

  • rabee

    @nick omg same i jailbroke it long time ago and it has everyfeatuer the new os4 has, folders, tap video focus, multi tasking, its amazing, i used blackra1n

  • Al

    Kyle, jailbreak with redsn0w. It let’s you tick off if you want: Cydia, multitasking, background wallpaper, etc. Just make sure your iPod touch or iPhone is 2nd Gen or 3G.

  • lillican

    Sometimes adding your own photos to the wallpaper sounds to be a good idea. iCamera 2010 can help you to make free iPhone 4 wallpaper with your photo libray. It is very easy and will bring you splendid idea to reality and show your photos!

  • Johnny

    Walpapers you might get away with but forget about multitasking on a 3g as it will bring it to a crawl in no time up to the point it will make you hate the product you once loved and make you want to chuck it at the wall out of frustration.

    To all of those that said it does what the iphone 4 does, All i say is have one for a week on a test run or maybe a 3gs even and you will not want to go back to the 3g ever as the performance of the later ones is just obliterating in comparison as far as multitasking goes etc.

    Jailbreak your iphone?? A matter of choice really but then again why not?? Its power to you!!