In 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.
[via Daring Fireball]
