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> If you start the stopwatch and leave the app, the stopwatch stops. ...there wasn't enough free memory to store a 64 bit timestamp of when the stopwatch was s

> If you start the stopwatch and leave the app, the stopwatch stops. ...there wasn't enough free memory to store a 64 bit timestamp of when the stopwatch was started? > You can set the e-mail app to check for mail every five minutes, but there is never any free memory, so the mail check never runs. There isn't even anything to keep the crucial alarm process alive. If the phone is busy when an alarm is supposed to go off, it just doesn't go off. An alarm you can't trust to work 100 percent of the time is useless. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think all of this stuff worked on iOS 1 in the original iPhone. It didn't have multi-tasking for most things, but preinstalled apps like the Clock and Mail were special. This sounds to me more like unfinished software than hardware limitations. Of course, I can imagine that hardware limitations would make finishing software harder—but Apple clearly did it.

wkat4242 1y ago
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think all of this stuff worked on iOS 1 in the original iPhone. It didn't have multi-tasking for most things, but preinstalled apps like the Clock and Mail were special. Also, they forced app developers right from the start (well from iPhone OS 2 because 1 didn't have third party apps) to expect their app to be killed at any time, and to save state constantly so that they could resume exactly where the user left off. Sounds like Firefox neglected to do this which is really awful when targeting such limited devices. It's one of the little things hat could have made it more workable.
- Wowfunhappy 1y ago
  That's not quite how I remember iOS 2. There were some apps that saved their state, but many did not. Pressing the home button, even for a moment by accident, frequently wiped out everything. And, I don't think there was a way for a third party Mail app to e.g. fetch new mail in the background. You essentially had to use Apple Mail.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    True, but the instruction to developers was already there. It just took them a while to get their heads around it. And no, third-party apps could not run in the background in iOS 2, indeed. That's why a lot of people still jailbroke (Cydia etc)

wkat4242 1y ago

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think all of this stuff worked on iOS 1 in the original iPhone. It didn't have multi-tasking for most things, but preinstalled apps like the Clock and Mail were special. Also, they forced app developers right from the start (well from iPhone OS 2 because 1 didn't have third party apps) to expect their app to be killed at any time, and to save state constantly so that they could resume exactly where the user left off. Sounds like Firefox neglected to do this which is really awful when targeting such limited devices. It's one of the little things hat could have made it more workable.

Wowfunhappy 1y ago
That's not quite how I remember iOS 2. There were some apps that saved their state, but many did not. Pressing the home button, even for a moment by accident, frequently wiped out everything. And, I don't think there was a way for a third party Mail app to e.g. fetch new mail in the background. You essentially had to use Apple Mail.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  True, but the instruction to developers was already there. It just took them a while to get their heads around it. And no, third-party apps could not run in the background in iOS 2, indeed. That's why a lot of people still jailbroke (Cydia etc)