Apple to allow background applications on the iPhone?

With the release of the new firmware for the iPhone, many users were waiting for the implementation of the “push notification” system that was announced by Apple at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference last June. This system would allow the applications developed by third-parties to receive notifications through Internet even when they’re not activated on the ipHone: it would be a way to go around the impossibility of leaving an application in background on the iPhone (except some already predetermined by Apple).

Apple had removed this feature from the firmware 2.1 beta after the Summer, apparently because the implementation had been heavily delayed. Now that the notification system seems to have been set aside, rumors say that Apple is thinking about the possibility of giving this feature to a restricted group of applications. This change should come with the version 3.0 of iPhone’s firmware.

The decision to stop the background applications was done in order to keep a high performance standard on the iPhone: since it doesn’t really have a proper hardware for multitasking, this kind of resource management would have determined lower battery durations.