Personally, I see no reason why Apple couldn’t allow the best of both worlds, for both background apps and notifications.

Just allow the user choice:

(1) allow a few apps to be enabled in the background, with the understanding that it will degrade battery life (depending on the app running)

(2) allow users more control over the notifications that do show. Why does Apple get to decide that a text message should get a prominent notification but an email should not?

I have to agree though, that the Android/Pre method of subtle notifications does scale much better. How annoying these notifications will become will only become apparent once Push Notifications are released.

And there is plenty of time to work it before 3.0 release. Remember, the first beta of 2.0 was not the same has the version of 2.0 that was released (funilly enough, push notifications were removed, and other stuff was added)

Note, there are 3 types of notifications currently available. Its not just popup messages. You can also get custom sounds and badges, which are unobtrusive enough

Its the notification system…engadget wrote about it:

“A big problem that Apple has yet to address with OS 3.0 is its obnoxious, obtrusive notifications. Where Android and webOS slide a handy “tray” into view to let you know you’ve got something incoming, the iPhone regularly piles on one notice after another, leaving you with a stacked, productivity-stalling, ugly mess of pop-ups. Apple, you kill this kind of annoying garbage in your browser — why do you think users want it in their phone? Even older systems get this one more right than Apple does — both Windows Mobile and the BlackBerry OS use a mixture of pop-ups and background notifications. It’s perplexing that a company so concerned with usability and simplicity has done nothing to address the situation in three iterations of its software.”

Apple marketed the iPhone as a 3 in 1 device. A phone an iPod and a internet communicator. Those should be the only 3 background processes allowed. All other should come trough one of those 3.

The people in a dire need of background processes will have their jailbreak solution.

the one consequence of background app I personally miss is not being able to return to the exact same position when I left the app.

If Apple/Developers fix that and the software becomes as responsive as in 1.0 I will not even talk about 3rd party apps.

I would like something more elegant instead of having that box jumping to the middle of the screen over and over. That´s why the Android solution is so good…

I´d like that whenever something wanted to alert you, it appeared in quickview format, for a short time, then to go a system bar tray, untill the user clicked on it, or cleaned the tray by swiping it

See how Elert email notifications runs

http://twitpic.com/28vjg

The reasons might be many, and clearly some of them have to do with weaknesses of the current iPhone (i.e. the battery), but if anyone has proved that they have the skills it’s those guys, right? Just take a look at how their work has shaped the industry in the last 2 year… simply amazing…

And yes, i am prepared for jailbreaking my 3.0 iphone, i will do it for sure. But it would be nice to see some more openess in this.

And i go back to the notifications system…its archaic…face it. Imagine sms + calendar + a series of Push Notification enabled apps jamming your screen with alerts….that had to change to something less intrusive. Again, jailbreaking i will probably avoid all this, but Apple should do it themselves…i hope that duringt the beta testing this comes to discussion, and they change it…again see what Android does, and see what the Elert aplication does

For the needs of most customers this update is simply superb – in fact it might as well have been tailored to me. The inclusion of mms and cut and paste saves me having to use Swirly and Clippy, and I should think the general stability of the device will have been tweaked too.

I’m particularly excited about background push notification – much as I HAVE been able to run background processes on my jailbroken phone the push system seems ingenious and very resource and power friendly – a much better solution than simply having all your apps ticking away in the background, using ram and (more crucially) the cellular network.

An app such as Beejive keeps you logged in to, say Facebook or MSN even after you press the home button, so once push notification is enabled in this programme I will never miss another IM. The alternative solution – for example Meebo for Android – stays running as a background process, and the result? The G1’s battery goes flat within a couple of hours.