Apple introduced modern background tasks last year on iOS 13. These new APIs have been out for a little over year (counting the beta period). Many developers have tried to adopt them to moderate success. Many of them have found them to be very unpredictable and that only work a fraction of the time. If you look around the internet (and even on the comments in that article), you will see many developers weren’t able to get them to work as expected.
In the article from last week, we explored the basic background execution APIs introduced since iOS 7. We explored how we could request additional time for a task to complete after entering the background, how we could defer downloads with URLSession, and how we could use silent push notifications to trigger background tasks.
The story with background tasks does not end there. iOS 13 introduced more APIs to do better background tasks, and that allow you to do things that weren’t possible before. Apple gave us the new shiny BackgroundTasks framework on WWDC2019. This framework gives developers more flexibility and less constraints to execute code while their apps are in the background. Not only that, but the old Background App Refresh APIs have now been deprecated in favor of a new, modern way to perform them for your app. This changes unifies with the new Background Processing tasks which lets you do more work in the background, while a device is charging, and more.
