Pastebot Uses Music To Get Around iOS 4 Multitasking Limitations

John Brownlee ()

Pastebot Uses Music To Get Around iOS 4 Multitasking LimitationsIn order to save battery life, Apple very intelligently limited the kinds of API calls multitasking apps could make in the background under iOS 4 to audio, VOIP and location. It’s a clever compromise, but it leaves a lot of common multi-tasking applications in the lurch: for example, your newsreader can’t update your list of RSS feeds when the app isn’t in focus.

The makers of Pastebot, a clipboard manager for iOS devices, were frustrated by the limitations of iOS’ multitasking capabilities, so they figured out a clever solution to keep Pastebot running in the background: they programmed it to play a silent audio file so that Pastebot was always kept in memory and didn’t need to be relaunched between every copy.

Needless to say, Apple wasn’t entirely thrilled with this solution, and rejected the app… but it was only because Pastebot played a silent audio track without user approval in the background, and that music’s only purpose was to keep the app in memory. The fix was simple: offer users the ability to choose which track Pastebot loops in the background. If a user wants to specify a blank track, so be it.

Apple was happy with this solution. It makes me wonder whether the same approach could be used with other apps like Reeder, or 1Password Pro, or Instapaper, that might benefit from running in the background.

DON'T MISS
Instapaper Creator Proposes Elegant Solution for Background App Updating

[via Daring Fireball]

5 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.

(sorry, you need Javascript to see this e-mail address)| Read more posts by .

Posted in iPhone Apps, News |

  • Alfred

    Clever, but its still a bit of an ugly hack though, which is a shame. Maybe multitasking for RSS feeders will come in iOS 5.0 or something.

  • Hanafi

    You know I really dont get all these “power user” types…
    Isnt the reason why apple limits the use of multi tasking is for battery life?
    You think if its really easy and possible to run every single app continuously in the memory Apple wont let it?

    So ok fine, you fool the app into playing a continuously looping music, have u checked the battery life? the overall stability of the OS?
    1 app is fine, what if 10 other apps are doing the exact same thing?

    Tell me why the heck do you need every app in the background? Windows mobile did it, and look how it turned out?

    Ive seen people with jailbroken phones running multitasker, and a whole lot of unofficial apps, and they keep complaining how the iPhone OS is unstable, they had to reset, etc.
    All I wanna tell them is that Its not the phone or the OS, its you that is being a dumbass.

  • Joseph

    “Apple was happy with this solution. It makes me wonder whether the same approach could be used with other apps like Reeder, or 1Password Pro, or Instapaper, that might benefit from running in the background.”

    Agreed. But if all these different functions can get around the restrictions by piggybacking on a music track, what the hell is the point of the restrictions? I don’t blame pastebot for using it, but I find the fact that Apple accepted it baffling. The more sensible solution is for Apple to add a background clipboard API.

  • http://www.paythegame.net somian

    kludge.

  • http://www.softphonemacphone.com Olivke

    VOIP? No it is not autorised on background, well in theory but UDP is bocked so only Skype could work, not the real VoIP …