Why The iPad Doesn’t Have Multi-Tasking
« Prev Next » 12:39 on January 30, 2010 android, apple, google, hardware, operating-systems, predictions, usability
One of the things discussed about the new Apple tablet, other than its lack of Flash, is its apparent lack of multi-tasking. Multi-tasking, of course, being the ability to listen to music or radio while playing Flight Control. I’d like to talk about that, because I’m pretty sure I know why there’s no multi-tasking, and if you’ll let me attempt prescience for a moment, I’m going to let you in on the secret.
Multi-tasking doesn’t work well enough yet. That is also to say that when it does, Apple will feed a system update which adds this feature; to the pad and phone alike. It’ll be just like when you all got copy and paste.
I’m an Android fellow. I cannot accept the closed platform that is the Apple ecosystem. The fact that I’d have to open iTunes to get stuff on to my phone instead of being completely unrestricted1, is something I couldn’t ever imagine settling for. Additionally, I am enjoying multi-tasking on my Android phone today; I’m listening to podcasts via Google Listen while browsing Wikipedia, and it’s a bliss I’m sure iPhone OS users will appreciate soon enough.
Even so, the Android implementation of multi-tasking is an example of why Apple hasn’t done it yet. Gruber was boggled by the need for a task killer on the platform, and frankly — so am I. Which is key to this issue. A single-tasking platform closes every app when a new app is invoked. The robo-logistics are simple: “Home” means “Save & Close”. Because this is simple, it works. Transparently, easily, and without the need to peek inside the system to see what’s running and what shouldn’t be.
Both Android and iPhone OS are pioneering new ways to interact with computers (which incidentally is why I now prefer these OSes on principle, over Windows, Linux and OSX). The new trend is to tuck away the filesystem; to whittle down all the nerdy stuff. To make it feel obsolete and unnecessary. You don’t drop your music into a folder, you drop it onto your phone and then sort it using meta information such as artist, year, album and so on. You also no longer window manage. You don’t open an app, you enter Google Listen. You don’t close an app, you press “Home”. If you were playing a podcast, it keeps playing even as you enter the browser to explore Wikipedia. If you weren’t playing a podcast, the system cleans up any stray processes for you, so the system doesn’t spend memory that isn’t needed. It’s all very elegant, and once you get used to it, closing apps feels very 1990.
Except it’s not as elegant as it sounds. Because apps themselves decide when they’re done using your battery and not all apps are good citizens. Sometimes you’ll click “home” with the intent of not going back to your game of Robo Defence. But Robo Defence isn’t sure what you want, so it’s just paused your game. Which means goodbye battery. Which means you need a task killer, whose sole raison d’etre is giving you a neat list of which apps are running in the background and the ability to forcefully close them.
I’m sure Android will get there. Development is moving at a blinding pace; in fact things may already be better in version 2.1. In the meantime, I’ll be loving my Google Listen background process. Even if it means I need a task killer. Once Android grows up, I’m saying a fond goodbye to my task killer, and I will never look back. But I’m not a normal user. I’m not one to be impressed by Apples “only launch when perfect” ideology, I much prefer Googles “launch early, iterate often” approach. I’m also smart enough to understand why Apple postpones multi-tasking until they get it right. Which is when you’ll get multi-tasking on your iPhones and iPads.
[Update]: Michael points out in the comments, that the iPhone has been able to play podcasts in the background since launch. My bad example. Please appropriate “Google Listen” with “Pandora” and my example will make sense again.
- Incidentally, I currently use an Android file explorer app to connect to my NAS and copy things from over the air. ↑
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I should hope so, it’s been possible to do on the iPhone since day one.
The iPhone OS does multitasking just fine, as evidenced by the fact that the iPod will happily run in the background of other applications and you can use the entire phone while being in a call. The problem, as you also point out, isn’t in the technical implementation, it’s in making it invisible and hassle free to the user; not a mean feat.
For my money, the state-saving of iPhone apps works fantastically for most of the things I do on my iPhone, though no doubt I would like for stuff like Latitude to run properly in the background (since its current implementation is largely useless on the iPhone).
For other stuff, like IM apps, push notifications solve some of the problems, though I’m not clear on how good the implementation is or what problems it presents, but since I haven’t seen a nice iChat-like client for the iPhone that just works, I’m guessing there are some inherent issues.
That doesn’t solve issues of not being able to run Pandora (or even DR’s nice little radio streaming app), and that of course needs fixing. But as it stands, the state-saving app-switching behavior is really hindered by a considerably more annoying fact of the app > home > app switching behavior, which is that switching takes a lot of time…
Now I don’t honestly think the iPad needs app switching to be as fast as on a traditional operating system (CMD-TAB), but there’s no doubt that the ‘Press home button, find new app (which could be on other screen), press, reorient’-process is multitudes too slow for a lot of tasks that I would otherwise undoubtedly do on the iPad.
I’m considering for instance the process I’m going through writing an entry _about_ the iPad; it takes me back and forth between TextMate (which could be any text app as it were) and a handful of tabs in my browser. I’m copying text and links from the browser to my text editor, which in OS X is fairly hassle-free, as I can have both applications open side by side and CMD-TAB between them when needed. Doing that on an iPad is likely to be quite annoying if Apple doesn’t take some measures to alleviate the problem.
Furthermore, I personally hope Apple implements something along the lines of the Dashboard from OS X. Again, switching from your text editor to a calculator, unit converter or dictionary would be considerably easier if they could be brought in as easily as Dashboard widgets on OS X.
Alright, so I’m glad you saw past my really bad example there. Obviously I should’a used a third party app example like Pandora.
Google Talk on Android works like a charm, and allows you any amount of notifications you want. In fact it runs so well in the background the same problem I illustrate with Robo Defence remains here; I’m not entirely sure how I close Talk once I’ve well started it.
Android has an interesting solution to this. I say interesting because while it works remarkably well, its discoverability is quite low, and I’ve not yet decided whether that’s okay. In any case, you long-press the home button and get something very similar to the “alt tab” window, which you can then use to switch to other apps.
One solution on the iPad could mimic this directly: long press the square home button to show apps to switch to.
On a related note, the alt tab window you get in this window isn’t actually other currently running apps, it’s recent apps. Obviously some of them are running, some of them are not. This all further illustrates Googles commitment to blurring the lines between when an app is open and when not.
If you imagine the “long press home button” scenario, do you think this would be sufficient? Or are you saying you want some form of window management back? In any case, both are good reasons for why Apple would postpone multi tasking until they have this polished down.
So Android does have “widgets” as in you can place a weather thing on your home screen. But I do know what you mean — floating widgets that reside in a space above your current app, ready to float down into accessability.
One idea could be for them to lift Google Chromes extension system to the global OS and combine it with their magic sidebar things — instead of clicking the “folders” pulldown in the mail app, click the “evernote” button, or “calculator” button or what have you. I feel like that’s one of the confluencing concepts emerging across Android, Chrome OS and iPhone OS.
I don’t use my task killer any more since I’m running the latest CyanogenMod Directors Cut. Might wanna give that a try :)
I’m not quite ready to root my phone yet, but good to know they’ve solved this problem. Care to elaborate how they’ve solved this problem? Do you just use your phone, your home button and app switcher and the battery isn’t affected as it used to be?
I think the lack of an extension system for Safari signals Apples disinterest in that kind of interference with their pristine works of art :P
I sometimes don’t get whether you’re sarcastic or not.
So I’m going to assume you love the ability to extend browsers, and dislike the fact that you can’t do that with Safari, I think I agree with you. Apple won’t make any money extending iPhone OS or Safari, so why should they?
I get that a lot. But in this case I wasn’t.
On the one hand, yes I love extensions. They’re neat. But for the longest time, while I was using Chrome on Windows and Safari on OS X, I didn’t have any, and I never missed them. To me it’s not a big deal really.
Now, granted, Safari _does_ allow for real plugins, as evident by Evernote’s plugin, which places a button in the toolbar, but I don’t know the specifics of the implementation hassle.
Just a note regarding your “long press” idea. You can configure the home button to do nearly that now. On my phone a quick press is home. A long press is “bring up iTunes”.
And now, not having multitasking on the iPhone has never been something I even noticed. And considering the speed I’ve seen in a few “hand on” videos of the iPad taken at the event I think I’ll notice it even less on an iPad.
Multi-tasking like Flash, front facing video camera, etc etc falls under the category of “might be nice if it was there, but not something I use much now anyway”.
Mind you, that’s for me. For you or anyone else that could be completely different. But, for me, the iPad looks like it will be quite a nice little machine.
I SAY NO TO I PAD B’cos, IT HAS,
NO WEB CAM
NO USB PORT
NO FLASH
NO HD SCREEN
NO SAT NAV
NO UNIVERSAL 3G
NO TV
NO MULTITASKING
I’m sure Jobs is fine with you not purchasing it.
I’m not the only one thinking dashboard.
Which one?
And you have some great points, but I’m an Android-fellow just like you, so no big surprise there.
EStrongs File Explorer.
I can’t say enough good things about that app. It’s represents the crux of why I love Android over iPhone. The only thing I don’t like about that app is the name. I’d have preferred simply “File Explorer”. But try it out. Seriously.
I don’t think the Ipad will be as successfull as the iphone, as it is not as knew and revolutionary.
Well, that convinces me.