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iPhone OS 4.0 Brings Multitasking, Ad Framework For Apps

Posted by timothy on from the define-myself-as-outside-the-fence dept.

Low Ranked Craig writes "Apple had an event today to show off the next major update to the iPhone OS. iPhone OS 4.0 should arrive this summer (presumably with a new iPhone) for iPhone and iPod Touch, and in the fall for the iPad. According to Apple the update has more than 1,500 new APIs and 100 new features including the sorely missed multitasking. Other highlights include unified inbox, improved security, support for multiple Exchange accounts, application folders, iBooks, and iAd, an advertising framework for developers to put ads in their applications. The official word from Steve on Flash and Java remains a simple 'No.'" Updated 20100408 22:09 GMT by timothy: Read on for more information, including some bad news if you want to program for the iPhone in C# or Flash CS5. alphadogg points out some what he calls surprise capabilities targeted at enterprise users and IT departments, including e-mail encryption and "mobile device management."

And CWmike adds more infomation at MacWorld about iAd, which he considers the biggest news in today’s announcement, writing that one way to look at the new advertising hooks "is that Apple can now leverage the App Store/iTunes ‘ecosystem’ lock-in in effect, and deliver to advertisers a huge captive audience."

Finally, binarylarry writes with a look from Daring Fireball at the new user agreement that goes along with 4.0: "Looks like Adobe's release of CS5 with the Flash-to-native compiler has been nixed by Apple's new user agreement: '3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.'"

28 of 983 comments (clear)

  1. No ads please by Matt+Perry · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Ads on mobile phone? DO NOT WANT. Unless I get a free phone and free service, but even then I'm not sure if I could tolerate it.

    --
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    1. Re:No ads please by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The ads are for the apps that choose to use them, not for the phone service.

      Like them or hate them, the more money Apple funnels towards the developers, the better software support it will have. If it's successful expect Android to follow suit.

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      "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

    2. Re:No ads please by beakerMeep · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You're right, but expect that line to get blurred over time. Look at PBS and NPR: they dont have ads, but they do. Google is starting to do this now with Google maps on Android. They put sponsored links in the search results. While fine and noninvasive in it's present form, over time I would fully expect them to get more invasive until it is as saturated as Television. No corporation can resist a new avenue for advertising revenue. Hell, even nonprofits like NPR/PBS can't.

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      meep
    3. Re:No ads please by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      iAd

      People are laughing at me when I suggest that future iMacs will have app store lockdowns and now will be "ad-supported" to boot. It's iPhone 4.0 today and OSX 11 tomorrow. And it will still be irresistibly shiny.

      You slashdotters out there: did you first get into computing and technology in order to consume more advertising and to have someone else tell you which software to run? Or did you turn to technology and computing in rejection of advertising and lockdowns (aka "command and control")? When you first got into computing and technology did you learn more from the gear that you had to fiddle with or the gear that "just worked"?

      I swear to you by all that is holy, by the time this is over, we're going to regret having been in such an all-consuming hurry to suck the iDick.

      Watch and See.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    4. Re:No ads please by clang_jangle · · Score: 5, Insightful

      People are laughing at me when I suggest that future iMacs will have app store lockdowns and now will be "ad-supported" to boot.

      Yes, they're laughing because you're woefully misinformed (or maybe just a troll). Apple has a very good thing going with developers and OS X -- and it's a completely different from their consumer electronic business because it's a completely different market. Many devs love OS X but wouldn't be caught dead with an iPhone or iPad. Many iPad or iPhone users are looking forward to the day they can replace their computer with an iPpliance -- totally different markets.

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      Caveat Utilitor
    5. Re:No ads please by AresTheImpaler · · Score: 5, Insightful
      People are laughing at me when I suggest that future iMacs will have app store lockdowns and now will be "ad-supported" to boot. It's iPhone 4.0 today and OSX 11 tomorrow.

      the ads are for those applications that want to make money thru ads. If developers dont want them, even on their free application, they dont have to include them. The whole thing is so that if you want to include ads, they have some hooks on the SDK so that it's easy for the developer.
      also, about app store lockdown, I seriously doubt it. In fact, when steam announced that they were releasing a mac client, appleinsider interviewed them (link here). John Cook from Valve was asked if Apple was helping them. He replied:
      "Cook: Yes, we've been working with them a bunch as we get more acquainted with their platform. They've been a great partner so far and we look forward to growing our relationship with them over time."
      So yeah, even tho some slashdot trolls and some slashdot haters do not like apple and make up stuff, what you said, it's not going to happen.

      Watch and See

    6. Re:No ads please by DJRumpy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Of course iPhone users have a choice. The ratings for apps are right there on the app page, along with user comments. If they get abusive with ads (and there are already some apps that tried this), the users complain, and the app gets a low rating. Since there are more apps than you can throw a phone at, it's rarely difficult to find one you like, even among the free offerings.

      "Lack of lock-in means I can find and use an alternative without ads. Or better yet, use an open source alternative if one exists. iPhone users have no such choice."

    7. Re:No ads please by clang_jangle · · Score: 4, Insightful

      For one thing OS X is a *nix, with full shell/root access. Tricky to lock that down, not to mention all the people who use it because of that would quickly switch to Linux.

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      Caveat Utilitor
    8. Re:No ads please by timeOday · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Apple has a very good thing going with developers and OS X

      Does apple even care about personal computers any more?

      The last noteworthy computer they announced was the Air (which in retrospect seems like a super-advanced iPad that was largely ignored).

    9. Re:No ads please by arb+phd+slp · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Final Cut Studio is a great example of how the two markets are different. The iGadgets are for the consumption of media content. Macintoshes are for the creation of media. What could possibly be gained by locking down the latter like is done on the former?

      --
      There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
    10. Re:No ads please by Red+Flayer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I wonder if you're aware that you're making excuses. The real objection is not about whether you like to see ads or don't like to see ads. No. The objection is that the moment you see a single ad you did not wish to see, you have lost control over the device. That's completely unacceptable when you are already paying. That's why personal preferences towards advertising are completely irrelevant.

      False. That's your objection, not mine. My objection would have nothing to do with control. It has to do with functionality. If the appliance does what I want from it, I have no problem. There are no excuses involved, since there is nothing to excuse.

      That makes it a fair exchange. However, when you are paying for a phone, phone service, and the application, and still see ads, this is no longer justifiable. It's a form of double-dipping. Thus, it's an adversarial way of relating to your customers because it amounts to taking advantage of them.

      And yet millions of people pay for cable television, or for magazines, which still have ads in them. I fail to see the problem. When people have the choice of services or appliances to use, then the problem solves itself. Content servers find a way to operate profitably with some kind of split revenue from customer billing and from ad revenues. Why shouldn't ad serving subsidize subscription cost?

      It has nothing to do with whether anyone likes ads. It has to do with the fact that a company is making money from ad revenue without earning that money by providing something of value in return.

      I don't understand. You can freely choose not to accept the services of that company, and not have to see any ads from them. Bully for you -- stand by your principles and don't do business with that company. Meanwhile, the fact that the company has two separate revenue streams doesn't bother me -- our CHOICE is to evaluate whether the service provided is worth the cost, where the cost includes the inconvenience or annoyance of ads, and the cash we lay out to the company.

      Do you ever wonder why there are so many companies that take advantage, exploit, and find ways to screw people over? It's because we reward them with our business.

      And that's our individual choice to make. You place a high value on maintaining "control" of your devices, or on not needing to see ads. I don't. So when presented with the same choice, you and I may choose differently. The market sorts out what business model is successful, not your personal value system.

      It's foolish to reward this behavior because it's parasitic in nature.

      That's silly. All profit-seeking enterprise is parasitic in nature if you look at it that way.

      The only time this would be acceptable would be for free apps that would otherwise cost money. Please read this quote from the summary and tell me whether you believe Apple is going to restrict these ad functions to free apps only

      No need to re-read, since I disagree with your premise. Why should we not have a choice between apps that are free and ad-laden, expensive and ad-free, or some other combination? Why does it have to be black-and-white? Why can't I choose an app that gives me what I believe to be the best service, but costs me some cash and also serves ads? Why not let the market decide which model (or even likely multiple models) is out there for me to choose from?

      And for that matter, so what if this were to go to the ridiculous extreme and Apple requires all apps to serve ads, or they won't get approved? So what? Then you can simply not use an Apple appliance. Nothing is forcing you to do business with them.

      Seriously, I don't understand where you're coming from. Because of a set of values YOU hold, that are far from universal, you want to limit the choices available to me as a consumer, and to developers also?

      --
      "Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
  2. Whoa, whoa by Bluesman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wait a second here. Wasn't the lack of multitasking a feature that made the iPad and iPhone so great? It allowed you to relax and compute!

    What are they doing? Why is Apple taking all of the zen out?

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    If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
    1. Re:Whoa, whoa by ShecoDu · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "In multitasking, if you see a task manager, they blew it. Users shouldn’t have to ever, ever, ever think about that stuff."

      Fast forward a year

      "In this new iPhone OS 5.0, we've working on a new revolutionary feature, a real task manager, this is going to greatly improve your experience with the devices, it's so great, even we are amazed!"

  3. Apple "Innovation" by Microlith · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Couple things:

    The multitasking method described is essentially identical to the one MS is using, with the process being halted in the background and the potential for it to be freed from memory at any time. The new addition is a background daemon or two that a program can contact to leave bits running while the rest is halted. Sort of a "low power multitasking." This is actually quite clever, and makes me wonder if it isn't using Grand Central closures to keep those bits spinning while the main process is halted.

    The task switching method has apparently been cited as looking extremely similar to the way S60 switches. I wouldn't know, but that's pretty funny if true.

    All in all, the critical juncture remains for me: The platform has been and will remain extremely closed. That alone is enough to ensure that I will stick with my N900 for the time being, and likely well into the future. I'll put my OS and developer interests behind MeeGo, and encourage openness.

  4. Welcome to the N900 age by EzInKy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Now if only iPhone owners could do what they want with the hardware they purchased.

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    Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
    1. Re:Welcome to the N900 age by vijayiyer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Tell me about it. iPhone owners want to run Sendmail on the iphone they purchased and ssh into it from their laptop.

      Oh wait, maybe it actually does do what they want, just not what _you_ want. Is it possible that the N900 is right for you and the iPhone right for others?

  5. Re:Fantastic news by QuantumRiff · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can't wait to see how many annoying (but non-flash) ads full of animation and video can do to get me right up to my 5GB data limit every month.

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    What are we going to do tonight Brain?
  6. Most important: restriction on app development by VZ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Interestingly enough nobody seems to have mentioned this gem yet. To summarize, Apple has decided to forbid

    Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool

    While this is clearly aimed squarely at Adobe and their Flash compiler I can't help wondering what does it mean even for C++ libraries such as Qt or wxWidgets (that I'm personally most interested in) as, with a bit of bad faith (that Apple doesn't seem to luck), they could be construed to be "intermediary compatibility layers" too. And this definitely seems to exclude using Perl, Python, Ruby or anything else.

    If anybody had any doubts about Apple openness, this should hopefully be enough to dispel them (although whom am I kidding... there will surely be people able to justify this as well).

    1. Re:Most important: restriction on app development by MBGMorden · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Because only great devs can write flashlight and fart apps?

      The reality is you can write good or bad code in any language. Their closed system is all about them keeping control. It does NOTHING to keep out "crap" developers (as completely shown by the amount of complete and utter "crap" already on the App Store).

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
  7. Re:Multitasking NOT coming to iPhone by UnknowingFool · · Score: 5, Insightful

    True multi-tasking isn't coming to the iPhone. The multi-tasking will be limited. If it falls under 7 different categories it will be supported.

    Apple has always been against mult-tasking because they claim it hampers performance and drains the battery. As a Window Mobile user, I can't count the number of times my phone was freaking sluggish only to find that certain apps were running in the background that didn't kill themselves properly. With this Apple will allow certain types of behavior. Most of the multi-tasking that most consumers have wanted falls under one of these categories. Now if you're trying to sequence a genome while twittering your friends, that's probably not supported.

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    Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  8. Re:LOL! Apple Hipster Douchebag Fanboys by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Mac OS 9 and earlier only had "co operative" multitasking and Mac zealots of the day used to proclaim it was better than "true" multitasking and came up with all sorts of rationales for it, until OS X came along of course. So history is repeating itself and Apple is bringing back their "it's better because it's worse" philosophy of the 90's. LOL.

  9. Re:I'm not upgrading... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I shouldn't have to literally break the law to make my phone run and work how I, the USER, want it to.

    You, the USER, didn't buy an open source phone. You bought a phone with a specified platform and method of operation. Maybe you should back the bus up and ask why you, the USER, bought a phone you didn't like.

  10. Re:Not true multitasking by iluvcapra · · Score: 5, Insightful

    look at how Palm WebOS does it.

    The three-hour battery life part or the going bankrupt by catering to whims of tech forum trolls part?

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    Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
  11. We are all living in the world of Steve Jobs by parallel_prankster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Seriously, Apple is beginning to suffocate us developers. Instead of providing a way allow parallel user apps to either exit cleanly or kill them to avoid hogging CPU, Apple comes up with a way to tell you that Apple will provide for parallelism, you just have to hook into one of our services. Seriously, as a developer, that is very frustrating. We know the app that we are making and know where opportunities for parallelization lie. We dont want apple to tell us that. To avoid a few apps that misbehave, apple now thinks that it should not allow multitasking at user level at all!

  12. Fairly idiotic. by aussersterne · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You prove the parent's point nicely. You're so attached to multitasking that you're willing to sacrifice battery life. Of course battery life has something to do with the topic, IT'S A PHONE. And you can say "Welcome to fast smartphones" all you want, but for most people these features:

    - Has a reasonable battery life
    - Doesn't require me to swap batteries
    - Lets me listen to music in the background

    Are more important than this feature:

    - Lets me run sendmail in the background

    iPhone has the first three and has since the beginning. You running around saying "Yay! Multitasking!" isn't saving Palm, and I say this as a Palm customer of over a decade that has gone iPhone.

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    STOP . AMERICA . NOW
  13. Depressing... by Ekuryua · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Between apple and sony, the world seems to be going towards lawyer locking of everything as fast as possible.
    I'm not sure about other people, but that sanitized future world is kind of really depressing.
    Next step is you'll have to spend all your digital money to the 4 big corporations that control and enforce each of their platforms integrity in totalitarian ways.

    News... that only come from a couple big media agencies.
    Games... that check permanently online they're unmodified, and require trusted platforms banning any form of liberty/homebrew.
    Videos&Music... that only come out in DRM form with you-are-only-renting-from-us terms.
    Internet connections... where you can only do what the isp deems safe.
    etc...

  14. The Revolution Will be Sponsored for You By by Mana+Mana · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ``If you don't want to see the ads, don't buy ad-supported apps. There is almost always a more expensive ad-free version.''

    Gad! Stop kidding yourself with statements like these: you paid full price so ads wont appear for the now fully fed. Fallacious: see cinemas with 30 minutes of boring-obnoxious ads & trailers!

    See paid! cable television "broadcasts" riddled with ads. See PBS shows larded with 5 minutes of introductory wheat fields, granaries, mines, wind fields ads. See XM/Sirius radio with ... ^.^

  15. Re:Apple Is Absolute Panic Mode Over Android by RightSaidFred99 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ahh, the typical Apple approach to things.

    "What, that??! That's not a feature!". "Multitasking? That just drains your battery, nobody wants that!".

    Android will bury Apple for the same reason the PC buried the Mac. There will be a dozen companies coming out with fancy new hardware at a breakneck pace that Apple cannot keep up with.

    It's already happening - the HTC Evo is to the iPhone what the iPhone was to an el-cheap Windows Mobile phone. Sure, the next iPhone will bridge the gap but Jesus, what's coming out later this year in the Android camp? I can't imagine.