iPhone background apps

I like John Gruber’s writing a lot and respect him, but really the background app thing is starting to sound very apologist. Make uninstalling foolproof.

If you truly demand the right to be able to shoot yourself in the foot with the software you install on your phone — which is a perfectly reasonable desire, and is how things work on the Mac — then the non-jailbroken iPhone isn’t for you.

Being able to “shoot yourself in the foot” is how things work on all platforms. It’s not how things work on, say, a toaster, or a tivo. If iPhone wants to be a platform, then people have to be able to “shoot themselves in the foot”, by which I mean install something that you decide later you don’t want, and have to uninstall it, a feat my parents could do no problem. This is all a non-starter anyway, as the app store should have ratings and user comments anyway, so people aren’t going to download these theoretical resource hog apps anyway.

The bullshit that users can’t have an IM client, or a third party email client, or a feed reader, or a location updater, or a network aware calendar, etc. to save some theoretical morons the trouble of having to uninstall some apps before they run out of storage space is ridiculous. People understand that more apps slow things down, people understand what uninstalling means. Don’t limit what people can do to protect a group of people that probably don’t even exist, have some faith in your customers, Apple.

iPhone background apps are required. This is a mobile networked platform. If an app can’t check something and inform the user of a change there is no point. This isn’t minor. There is not one single cool app that can be made with this restriction, it would only be games. I am optimistic though, that Apple will fix this before the sdk launch. There are options too, even an iPhone service that other apps register with that does the checking for them if they are really paranoid. If they can’t figure something out though I can only hope Android picks up some steam.