Yesterday I wrote that I didn’t think background applications were a good idea on the iPhone and I’ve seen some other posts that support my position; anything that makes the phone less stable is bad. A good friend of mine pointed out why a background app would be good, but also reminded me of how this was handled on the Palm OS. Notifications were posted. So an application would register for a notification or set an alarm for a specific time and then would handle that. While I’m not saying the Palm OS was perfect (if you ever wrote Palm OS software, you remember that notifications and alarm callbacks had to reside in the first 16K (or was it 64K) of the application thereby causing you to use jumps to get stuff to work. If you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, feel lucky.
The iPhone could do something similar (maybe it already does, but I don’t know and even if I did, I couldn’t say publicly until June). I’m sure that the iPhone SDK will mature as time goes on, but I hope that developers remember that the iPhone is a phone and music player first, and an application player second (or third or fourth). If anything takes away from its main purpose, it will hurt the platform.