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Loopt Sneaks Background Multitasking Into Its iPhone App
- derefr 17y agoIt seems to me that, right now, location polling is really the major reason people request background processing. If Apple would put a feature into the settings that let the user regularly push their location to Apple, and then a section in the Notifications settings for whether each app could access that location once pushed, a large swath of complaints would be eliminated at once, and the battery life would only have to be spent in one place, instead of being hacked in by each app that you want to track you.
- DarrenMills 17y agoThat would be a great medium. Rather than having 4-5 apps requesting your location every 10 seconds, you could have Apple request once every 3-5 min, and allow you to designate which software has access to it... Great call.
- kogir 17y agoI can only guess as to Apple's motivations, but that's probably a liability risk they'd rather not incur. At Loopt we don't have a choice; It's our business.
- omouse 17y agoIsn't there another smartphone that lets you use background processing?
- seiji 17y agoThat's what FireEagle [1] was designed for. All of your devices only send location information to FireEagle, then you register applications with FireEagle to receive your place data. Your location is secured by defining granularity per-application (e.g. application A can only see the city I'm in, but B can see where I am down to meter resolution, while C is blocked at territory level resolution). [1]: http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/ http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/
- kogir 17y agoThat title is very misleading. Finding a way to get location from sources other than the phone when the app isn't running is far from "Sneaking Background Multitasking."
- DarrenMills 17y agoThat's partially my bad. I copied the title of the article rather than re-naming it. I considered it, but for whatever reason decided against it.
- tlrobinson 17y ago"and the iPhone takes no hit to its battery life as it's all running in the cloud." Um, what does that even mean? Does "cloud" just mean "a network" now?
- stcredzero 17y agoIt means the author/editor or some combination is a bit muddle-headed about how this works. Here's my guess. There's software in the cell towers that now forwards ping times to a server somewhere that does the triangulation, as opposed to your handset. This way, the iPhone doesn't have to do anything it's not already doing, hence no drain on battery life.
- jawngee 17y agoI have a few questions: * How the F does this work? * Is AT&T involved? * Is any of this data admissible in a court of law? * Why would you want to broadcast your location to a list of people constantly 24x7 - outside of some kind of job requirement?
- timdorr 17y agoYes, AT&T is involved. Go into your account on wireless.att.com and under the My Profile section is a location privacy tab. Just saw this today when looking for my contract expiration date. Pure coincidence, I swear...