Good reason for no iPhone background applications

Craig Hockenberry is a well known developer and his latest blog post on furbo.org discusses why background applications on the iPhone are a bad idea.  Here are some excerpts:

"As someone who has been involved in iPhone development for the past six months, please let me offer you a healthy dose of reality.

Twitterrific on the iPhone could definitely make use of a background process to gather new tweets. In fact, a prototype version of the software did just that. And it was a huge design failure: after doing XML queries every 5 minutes, the phone’s battery was almost dead after 4 hours. In fact, the first thing I said after giving Gruber this test version was “don’t use auto-refresh.”

The heart of the problem are the radios. Both the EDGE and Wi-Fi transceivers have significant power requirements. Whenever that hardware is on, your battery life is going to suck. My 5 minute refresh kept the hardware on and used up a lot of precious power.  ...

And right about now, you’re thinking “But I’ll be smart about how I use the hardware.” Sorry, bucko, but you’re the exact reason why we don’t have background processing in the current SDK. You’re living in your own little dream world.

What happens when App A uses the network at 5 minutes past the hour, and App B uses it at 10 minutes past, and App C uses it at 15 minutes past, and so on? There’s no way for you to know what other apps are doing is there? And yet the battery is still taking a pounding.

In my opinion, such a scenario is quite likely. As a satellite device, the iPhone requires contact with other machines to do interesting things. Periodically hitting the network is the primary reason that developers want to run in the background.

Some have stated that Apple is limiting innovation. My opinion is that they are helping us from collectively shooting ourselves in the feet."

You can read the full post here.