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.
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.
If you check the forums, Apple Engineers say that background tasks typically only run overnight https://forums.developer.apple.com/forums/thread/654424
People syncing their photos to the cloud expect them to sync pretty much instantly if the battery isn’t low (which iCloud will do)
That doesn’t say the API doesn’t work. That says the API that dev chose is for when your device is going to run heavy background tasks (processing). This API is designed to run when the device has plenty of battery or is plugged in and isn’t doing anything else. That’s not unexpected, nor is it any different from Apple apps (you don’t want spotlight indexing or photo recognition to fire when you’re low on battery or in the middle of playing a game).
Uploading photos isn’t a heavy background task. There’s gotta be a way to do upload it as you take the photo. And I’d think sending new photos to an app would be done by a push notification or would work similar to receiving new emails in the background from the many third party mail apps that do this.
Again, I want to see what the suing devs claim and what Apple counters with.
