Some rationale for the lack of multitasking on iPhone

Like everyone else I have many times been annoyed that I can only run one app at a time. Exiting Tweetie and losing my place in a nested conversation in order to email the tweet to a friend sucks.

Nintendo DS

Nintendo DS has dominated mobile gaming for years, and Nintendo is loving it, but no longer really trying. Apple came in with 99 cent games and has seriously eaten into DS sales and games purchases. Gaming sites like Shacknews that are full of users that are traditionally anti-Apple are starting to be littered by “I may have to buy an iPhone” type comments.

But you can’t compete with a dedicated games console if games on the platform have to share resources with a Twitter client, a web browser, IM, IRC, Google Latitude, etc.

Games need all the RAM, and all the CPU cycles on limited mobile devices. iPhone would not be churning out games at the standard and performance they are if multitasking was allowed.

As a prediction I guess that games on Android will never have the same level of performance as they do on iPhone. Certainly so far, they haven’t.

Perception of quality

Apple pulls out all the stops when it comes to making products that feel great. Palm tried to mimic this with the Pre, but the keyboard drawer feels flimsy. There hasn’t been an Apple product in years that feels “flimsy”. Nintendo went all Apple with the Wii, but if you look at it it is covered in seams and breaks in the smooth surface due to concealed compartments. Apple products look clean and stylish as well.

Quality also includes reliability, robustness and performance.

If you have background apps, the foreground app will have performance issues. It’s average performance will be less predictable, depending on background load. The overall impression of the system will be less.

Everyone has a story about some device that broke in a weird way due to strange circumstances. Eg. my Firefox broke because I installed adblock and some other ad block plugin simultaneously once. It was a crappy bug to diagnose. But I’m a computer guy, I figured it out in the end. For less savvy people what is the solution? Generally the solution is bad mouthing the device/software in question at the pub.

Apple know that if you add complexity to a system, then strange bugs will happen for small numbers of people. But these bugs lead to really aggressive blog posts, and equally aggressive conversations at the pub. It leads to a sense of dissatisfaction about the product that is hard to solve.

Apple would love, with hindsight, to do the same to OS X. But they can’t. So they did it to the iPhone. Very limited multitasking (just some of their apps). There’s no chance of some apps failing because another app is monopolising the cell-radio, or some app crashing due to memory running out.

And it’s worked, you don’t read stories like that on the net. But you can read stories about app developers having bug reports from jailbroken iPhones that have so many apps running there are memory issues.

Battery Life

Apps like Last.fm’s iPhone app seem to obviously require an exception to Apple’s rules. Music is a background activity on a mobile device! You can’t resume tracks when you have quickly exited the app to check your calendar. It makes the app a lot less useful.

But Last.fm always uses the 3G connection to stream music. Allowing any number of apps to run in the background means a lot less battery life. And perceived batter life is what people talk about at the pub when ranking their mobiles. Apple wins at the cost of multitasking.

Developers

Developers that are used to making apps for dual core desktop machines with 2GB of RAM are not at all ready for mobile devices. Until the iPhone mobile development was the pursuit of a small number of dedicated companies. Apple wanted to open mobile dev up to everyone to make the iPhone more appealing to consumers.

So single tasking allows the developer to treat the iPhone more like the desktop computers they usually dev on.

Still…

It’s a PITA.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 19:47 and is filed under Life. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.