Back in early January we wrote a post titled The truth about iOS multitasking: not multitasking at all?. In it we highlighted Fraser Speirs’ comments that iOS devices aren’t exactly multitasking in the first place, and that the multitasking tray in iOS doesn’t need to be manually managed.
The article created quite the stir in our comments, with people people claiming that Speirs had no idea what he was talking about. Keeping that in mind, we thought we would post a follow up. Speirs has released an article on his website along with videographic evidence that supports his claims about the multi-tasking bar, and how managing the apps in it is often futile.
iOS Multitasking from Fraser Speirs on Vimeo.
The video makes it pretty clear that manually managing the apps in your multitasking tray provides little benefit, unless something funky is happening with your application. A case in point: last night, while trying to take a photo of my lovely newborn, the camera app on my iPhone was acting up. The photo button stopped responding and I was unable to snap a photo. My only saving grace was to physically close the application and remove it from the multitasking tray. Applications on the iPhone certainly don’t behave like applications in OS X. Traditionally we were beaten over the head with the axiom that if an application was running, it was tying up system resources and slowing down your machine. iOS does a much better job of managing that kind of behavior automatically.
Well stated, however there are times where multitasking would be advantageous. For instance, when Obama was about to announce that they caught Osama I was jumping between Safari and Twitter pretty quickly. Each time the video stream would stop in Safari and I would have to restart it.
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