As developers eagerly download the iPhone SDK, is the gloss beginning to rub off? Robert Balousek spotted a potentially app-upsetting clause in the software’s documentation regarding third-party apps and background processes. It seems Apple is concerned that iPhone users might feel some of the molasses drag that Windows Mobile handsets experience when there are too many programs running in the background; rather than deal with that as creatively as they’ve managed the rest of the SDK, though, they’ve issued a blanket ban on any third-party software running when not the in-focus app. That means – no matter whether IM client, image editor or game – the program has to quit.

“Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits” Apple SDK documentation

“It’s important to make sure that users do not experience any negative effects because of this reality. In other words, users should not feel that leaving your iPhone application and returning to it later is any more difficult than switching among applications on a computer” Apple SDK documentation

Cue two arguing perspectives, already branded as Apple fanboys and WM sympathisers by their rival camps; the former see it as a sensible way to manage the iPhone experience, especially when your user base is likely to comprise a whole lot of people to whom task managers are unknown, and one which will encourage developers to think up clever save-and-resume routines to satisfy Apple’s “this must be invisible to the user” demand. The latter, however, view it as another example of Apple attempting to control the iPhone environment to the detriment of developers and, in the end, users; they’d rather see intelligent automatic task management (pointing to Symbian as having a similar, generally pretty effective system of automatically killing rogue or leftover processes when CPU cycles and memory are needed) and owners given a choice about whether they get multitasking or not.

Interestingly, TBG points out something that I didn’t know about the Symbian developer environment:

“It stands to reason that Apple will eventually provide a workaround; Symbian for example, grants developers rights to restricted attributes for additional fees” TBG

Several commentors have suggested that, as AOL have developed their iPhone AIM client with Apple’s blessing for instance, that software is more likely to be permitted background running than something from a normal, unconnected developer. There may be workarounds, but that hangs on how draconian Apple are with checking for them.

It looks as though Installer.app and Jailbreaking won’t be going anywhere soon, unless Apple adapts its policies. Seemingly, when Steve Jobs said third-party developers were going to get “the same applications” that Apple’s own coders use to create software for the iPhone and iPod Touch, what he didn’t mention was that their creations wouldn’t get the same freedom on the device itself.

[Via Apple kill third-party background processes on iPhone - PHONE Magazine]