Apple Begins To Accept iOS4 Apps

Although we've been running the iPhone OS 4 (now known as the iOS 4) since April when it was first announced for beta in April, we haven't been able to try out any of the fancy new multitasking features, since there were no released third party apps that supported it. It's all about to change as of today! Apple is now accepting iOS 4 apps, which means that we should see quite a few apps that take advantage of multitasking on the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, as well as make use of the 1500 othernew APIs in the system when it launches on June 21. That is definitely good news but we still have a feeling that Apple's take on iPhone multitasking will still take people by surprise since only certain tasks are allowed in the background and apps that need to run persistently like IRC and IM clients, still won't work effectively. In fact, some devs are discussing that additional backgrounding tools are needed to provide features that users were originally seeking. Instapaper's Marco Ament has proposed a network polling API that would allow his app to update content in the background for example. We'll see how Apple responds to the requests but for right now, most people will be happy to switch away from a Skype call or GPS app while using the iPhones. For others, this is nothing really new as jailbroken devices have had multitasking available for a while now but the new APIs will still come in handy for more creative apps.