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.