Information Week is reporting that Microsoft’s new Mobile OS will not offer multitasking for third party apps. In a note to developers, Microsoft technical evangelist Yochay Kiriaty wrote, “Windows Phone allows only one application to run at any given time in the foreground, and no 3rd party applications are allowed to run in the background.”
This means that whenever a user navigates out of application to answer a call — or do anything else — the app is quit. At this stage, we do not know the extent to which first party Microsoft apps will run in the background.
Given the years of flack and complaints that were leveled against Apple for this very issue, I’m surprised that Microsoft went with this decision. Multitasking is a major draw on a Mobile OS, and not having it will be a major black mark against the fledgling platform.
Looks like a repeat of the Kin then. They’ve misunderstood the current user market if they think multitasking isn’t important, or alternately they’ve built class leading turn by turn navigation into the base OS (which I very much doubt).
Considering what the system is doing with the Personal Cloud they probably are holding off so user’s won’t be saying stuff like it isn’t synching my photo I just took because they got a ton of other 3rd party apps running in background taking up all the resources.
Hopefully multi task will there for all. But right now on my iphone I hate having to delete everything running so I now just leave them there till things get slow.