title: Designing iPhone iOS4 application behavior: running in background vs. terminating application
body: <p>We're developing iPhone GPS application for car drivers.</p>
  
  <p>As you probably know, iOS4 introduced multitasking, so our application can run in background - and it is. It's part of its functionality.</p>
  
  <p>The problem is with standard method of closing applications on iOS4. Here are two scenarios:</p>
  
  <p><strong>1) User wants to put application to background:</strong></p>
  
  <p>Typically, on iPhone iOS4 it is as easy as pressing 'home' button. </p>
  
  <p><strong>2) User wants to turn application off</strong> (ie. after arriving to his destination point):</p>
  
  <p>Standard iPhone iOS4 procedure is as follows:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>press 'home' button - application goes to the background</li>
  <li>press 'home' button twice - list of running applications appears</li>
  <li>tap and hold one of the applications icons - all icons 'shake' and '-' sign appears on each one</li>
  <li>tap '-' sign at the application icon user wants to terminate</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>User <strong>has to</strong> terminate our application each time he arrives somewhere (like, twice a day), to save his battery. If he does not - GPS would consume all the <strong>battery power</strong> really quickly. Also, we can't disable GPS while running in background, because we need precise location information for main application functionality.</p>
  
  <p>Of course you can't change the behavior of 'home' button from your application (to be accepted to AppStore). Also I don't think it would be good solution to change expected behavior to something completely different than other applications on the iPhone platform.</p>
  
  <p>What do you think about that? Do you know any good solution. <strike>We have one idea but I don't want to suggest anything to you yet. </strike></p>
  
  <p><strong>Our idea for solution is very simple:</strong> Simply, show small 'x' button at the top right screen corner. Tapping it terminates the application (perhaps after some confirmation question). </p>
  
  <p>This solution has one big advantage: it does not change default system behavior - users aware of iOS4 multitasking usage could  still press 'home' button to run app in the background and close it iPhone-way.</p>
  
  <p>What do you think?</p>