Extended Battery Life

Because of Apple’s legendary silence (lack of communication), the burgeoning iPhone developer community is wondering aloud why Apple isn’t allowing background apps to exist on their phone. Mike Ash has a great breakdown and why Apple’s current argument just doesn’t add up.

Jon Gruber is happy to explain from an unknown source of authority that the reason for this is that Apple is trying to maximize battery life and performance.

I would be willing to believe that if I could simply apply that theory to the existing Apple-made apps on the iPhone when it comes to battery life. I have noticed a slow decrease in battery life in my iPhone after each update. It has led me to believe that I just need to leave the Brightness down to barely 1/4 of the way up all the time. Also, I would LOVE to see the realtime performance of MobileMail because as far as I can tell, it’s the buggiest app on the phone. It has no ability to understand what “manual” checking for mail really means. Whenever I’m stuck in the endless pit of individually deleting 100 messages in one session, Mail will happily recheck for new messages every so often despite the fact that I’ve never instructed it to do so. Guess what that untimely check counts as? A background process that I’m sure is killing the battery on my phone. The other mind-numbing void on the phone is voice notes. I can’t understand at all why this simple idea escaped Apple.