this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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Not getting it. There’s nothing stopping you from storing your photos in Amazon Photos, or Google photos, or Dropbox, or whatever.
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?
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/backgroundtasks
Yup
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.
Literally no photo apps sync in the background. Apple is a trillion dollar company who wield a monopoly over their users computers and data, and you are defending them. Your defense enables enshittification, and capitalisms exploitation of consumers.
I had an older phone and only a couple apps that would need it. I think it intentionally didn't schedule anything to save power because the phone "can't handle it" anymore.