There’s been quite a bit of discussion over Apple’s decision to ban iPhone SDK applications from running in the background. I found a link to a great argument by Hank Williams in favor of background processes on a post (”The Flip Side of the Multitasking Argument“) over at John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. In it, Williams mentions that “with location aware devices we can broadcast not just ‘presence’ but location.”
With a device so personal, would you want to allow background applications to broadcast your exact location or status? For me that’s an action I would want to explicitly allow, and that permission would most likely come in the form of actively running the application in the foreground.
I realize the argument may venture be on the borderline of Orwellian paranoia, but there are new considerations that have to be made for such smart mobile devices.
