Sad but true. Even I was under the impression that when Apple said iOS 4 was going to support multi-tasking, that it was actually going to support multi-tasking. That’s not to say Apple’s solution is bad - in fact, it’s quite brilliant. It’s just missing a critical ability; the ability for apps to make requests for data over the Internet in the background.

Most iPhone users expect this to be possible as of iOS 4 and it’s not the case currently.

By naming these features “multitasking”, Apple has set customers’ expectations to include what apps can do in a traditional computer multitasking environment.

It’s going to mislead people into expecting such behavior from apps, but we can’t actually deliver most of it.