Craig Hockenberry on exactly why Apple don’t let developers run background apps.
He makes some very interesting points about the reasons why he believes Apple didn’t include such a feature. He also makes another excellent point about iPhone development:
It takes several months of actual iPhone development before you eventually realize that the iPhone requires a completely different mindset. Until that happens, you’ll make assumptions based on desktop experience, and that in turn will lead to a lot of bad designs
this is one thing that worries me slightly. Apple clearly spent a lot of money on researching the iPhone and its interface as a platform, third party developers, at least to my knowledge, are not able to make use of this which could result in some “interesting” interfaces and concepts.