Thoughts on iPhone OS 4.0

As most peo­ple read­ing this site know, Apple held an event last Thursday to announce iPhone OS 4.0 and pre­view some of it’s fea­tures. Now that I’ve had some time to digest the announce­ment I’ll relay my thoughts. Keeping in mind that the mes­sage being deliv­ered last Thursday was meant as much for devel­op­ers as it was for end users; I thought that, over­all, iPhone OS 4.0 looks like a solid release. Much like OS 3.0 before it, iPhone OS 4.0 con­tains few, if any, ground­break­ing new inter­face metaphors or user fea­tures. Most of the new fea­tures will really only make their mark in the form of the appli­ca­tions that make use of them, but they will have a large impact on the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad experience.

During the event Apple intro­duced seven “tent-pole” fea­tures, Multitasking, Folders, Enhanced Mail, iBooks, Enhanced Enterprise Support, Game Center and iAds. I’ll run though each fea­ture and give my thoughts on it.

Multitasking

People have been whin­ing about this from day one. It’s prob­a­bly the sin­gle most cited “crit­i­cism” of the iDe­vices. The mar­ket­ing for the Motorola Droid ham­mers on it. The iDe­vices, so they say, can­not mul­ti­task. Of course that state­ment always was utter bull­shit. The iPhone has been able to mul­ti­task from day one. What the iPhone didn’t do before was allow arbi­trary 3^rd party appli­ca­tions to run in the back­ground in the same way that desk­top appli­ca­tions can.

What has been miss­ing from the calls for Apple to allow arbi­trary back­ground appli­ca­tions is any sort of rea­son why Apple should allow that. Every jus­ti­fi­ca­tion that I’ve read has used exam­ples that, while they make sense on a desk­top oper­at­ing sys­tem, make no sense at all for a win­dow­less single-task-focused device like an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.

Fortunately Apple ignored the idiots and took their time in deliv­er­ing mul­ti­task­ing to the iPhone OS. Instead of allow­ing apps to waste resources run­ning in the back­ground where the user has no way of inter­act­ing with them Apple has intro­duced a new set of APIs to allow apps to freeze their state when the user shifts to a new app and to hand off processes to a hand­ful of APIs designed to han­dle the most com­mon “back­ground” needs.

Sadly, I failed to doc­u­ment this, but I have long sus­pected that this was the path that Apple would take with mul­ti­task­ing in the iPhone OS. From the stand­point of an end user, I think that this is pre­cisely how mul­ti­task­ing should have been han­dled. Contrary to pop­u­lar con­cep­tion, humans aren’t actu­ally very good at mul­ti­task­ing. What we’re good at is seri­ally uni­task­ing with extremely fast con­text switch­ing. I know, that’s an extreme sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, but it’s close enough to real­ity for our pur­poses. The new mul­ti­task­ing model intro­duced with iPhone OS 4.0 fits neatly in that model, and can be expanded in the future to han­dle addi­tional “back­ground” tasks.

Folders

With the vast num­ber of avail­able apps in the App Store, app man­age­ment has essen­tially become unten­able. Folders is Apple’s answer to that prob­lem. Stated sim­ply, a “folder” in iPhone OS 4.0 is an icon on the iDe­vice home screen that itself holds up to 12 app icons. There’s noth­ing fancy here, but those of us with large app col­lec­tions will wel­come the feature.

Enhanced Mail

Enhancements to Mail in iPhone OS 4.0 include the abil­ity for 3^rd party apps to open attach­ments, thread­ing and a uni­fied Inbox. Yay, I sup­pose. These all sound nice, but I believe that there is a fun­da­men­tal lim­i­ta­tion to how email can be han­dled on an iPhone/iPod Touch sized screen. I’ll revisit my opin­ion when I see the changes in action.

iBooks for iPhone

I’m not sure why this needed to be rolled out with an OS update, but it was inevitable. Hopefully we won’t have to wait until MacOS X 10.7 LOLCat to see iBooks on the desktop.

Game Center

Oddly, this fea­ture is not listed on Apple’s iPhone OS 4.0 pre­view page. Basically this is a set of social net­work­ing tools akin to the exist­ing OpenFeint or Plus+ net­works. I don’t do much gam­ing on my iPhone, and I really don’t like the social net­work gam­ing stuff, so I don’t have much to offer here. I’ll let peo­ple more in touch with the iDe­vice gam­ing mar­kets com­ment here.

Enhanced Enterprise Support

This is another area where I’m just not qual­i­fied to com­ment. I will say, though, that it’s abun­dantly clear that Apple def­i­nitely want’s to see the iDe­vices embed­ded in every aspect of a user’s exis­tence. Pundits claim­ing that the iDe­vices are just for “grand­par­ents” just don’t get it.

iAd

Probably the least-well-received tent-pole was iAd; and Apple built and man­aged frame­work for mobile adver­tis­ing on the iDe­vices. More than at any other point in Thursday’s announce­ment it was here where Apple made it utterly clear that the hon­ey­moon with Google is over. Apple’s response to Google mov­ing into their ter­ri­tory with Android and ChromeOS was blunt and to the point. Apple has every inten­tion of own­ing ad rev­enue in the iDe­vice ecosystem.

Of course there was the inevitable howl­ing from cheap cunts regard­ing iAd. To them I have only one response: fuck you, you cheap fuck­ers. You had a choice to pay app devel­op­ers what their time was worth, but you insisted on “free.” Well, enjoy your emotion-laden cin­e­matic adver­tise­ments you skin-flints.

The Rest

There were a few addi­tional items that bear com­men­tary but didn’t fall under Apple’s big cir­cus tent.

The first is the issue of hard­ware sup­port. The “full” com­pat­i­bil­ity list is present on the iPhone OS 4.0 pre­view page linked above (I put “full” in quotes because it’s actu­ally delight­fully vague), but the bot­tom line is pretty sim­ple. If you have an iPhone 3g, 3Gs, 2^nd gen­er­a­tion or 3^rd gen­er­a­tion iPod Touch then iPhone OS 4.0 will install. The actual fea­tures that you will have access to depend on the par­tic­u­lar hard­ware with the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion devices sup­port­ing “almost every­thing” and the level of sup­port drop­ping as you move far­ther into the past.

One inter­est­ing note is Steve’s com­ment that the iPhone 3Gs and 3^rd gen­er­a­tion iPod Touch would sup­port “almost every­thing.” That implies that there are fea­tures that they won’t sup­port. And that implies, to me at least, that there will almost cer­tainly be a 4^th gen­er­a­tion iPhone announced in the same time­frame that iPhone OS 4.0 become avail­able; which would be con­sis­tent with his­tor­i­cal releases.

The other issue that has been raised is the fact that Apple is remov­ing sup­port for the first gen­er­a­tion iPhone and iPod Touch hard­ware. Some have indi­cated that this is a bad move for Apple. My response is yet another “fuck you.” People seem to for­get that, prior to the iPhone, you were lucky to get sim­ple bug fixes for a cell phone or PDA, let alone two major oper­at­ing sys­tem releases. Apple must even­tu­ally aban­don sup­port for older hard­ware in order to move forward.

Of course, no com­men­tary on Thurday’s announce­ment would be com­plete with­out a com­ment on the related issues of the changes to the iPhone Developer Agreement Secion 3.3.1 and how it relates to devel­op­ment using non-Apple tools. This change has gen­er­ated an ungodly amount of noise, includ­ing some extremely ill-advised com­ments from Adobe employ­ees. Instead of adding my blather to the mix, I’ll just say that I agree with this almost entirely.

Well, there you have it kid­dos. All in all, I’m look­ing for­ward iPhone OS 4.0.