Apple is facing a near-£3bn lawsuit over claims it breached competition law by effectively locking millions of UK consumers into its cloud storage service at “rip-off” prices.
Except the API non-neutrality.
Only Apple applications are allowed to operate in the background. Element (Matrix chat application) actually had to disable its app showing up in the share context menu because the encryption method breaks when it was used.
I don’t know what features Apple photos or files have, but other apps wouldn’t be able to do background downloads (downloading files added to a folder by another device,) on-device photo digestion (apple photos classifies what is in your photos and what text is in them in the background for privacy reasons,) and similar things.
Edit: and yes I know that there’s a background refresh toggle, but it doesn’t work. It just straight up doesn’t work. That feature is entirely up to the OS when it wants to schedule that “background refresh”. In my experience it never does.
Edit 2: Also, only Apple storage integrates directly with the photos app and files app. And that only one comes preinstalled.
Is this the feature you’re saying doesn’t work?
It’s strange that there would be so much documentation for an API that reportedly doesn’t work. Including a 2019 WWDC session explaining how to run in the background for more processor intensive tasks.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/707
There’s even a recent step by step post on Medium explaining how to implement short or long background tasks. Doesn’t say anything about it not working.
https://medium.com/@dbabic_38867/background-tasks-on-ios-c27366723b6d
If it really doesn’t work then I’d imagine the lawsuit will be won handily. It’ll be interesting to see what becomes of this.
