Since the announcement of iPhone OS 4.0, I’ve been reading up in more detail about multitasking on the various mobile platforms. John Gruber posted an elegant explanation about how the iPhone’s new multitasking feature will be very similar to Android’s existing one.
This begs the question though, does Verizon not understand how this feature of Android works? As I posted earlier, they sent a memo to each of their stores instructing employees to load an auto task killer app onto their customers’ Android phones. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a corporate behemoth doesn’t understand something.
However, I would love to see the results of a test or two comparing usage in certain scenarios with and without task killer apps running.
Is there a perceived need for task killer apps because Android allows more categories of apps to have processes run in the background? For example, there are some Android apps that can change the behavior of your phone depending on conditions, like time of day, wifi networks detected, or GPS location. My understanding that at least with the first release of 4.0, that category of apps will not be supported. Are users installing these kinds of apps and not understanding the implications?
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