I don’t buy it.
So many barely-released iPad apps would get dragged back to the drawing board to take advantage of it. Releasing such a huge change now would be akin to releasing iPhone OS 3 just six weeks after v2. The time to get the ball rolling on this would have been before the iPad launch, not after.
The closest we might see would be something wherein a running app, when told to “shut down,” would have a snapshot taken of its RAM state and written to the internal flash storage — which could then be reloaded and be seamlessly resumed.
This isn’t new. OS X already does something similar system-wide when it “hibernates.” Emulators like MAME and SNES9x have been able to do it for years (the virtual machine nature of emulators probably makes it particularly easy). Windows CE Mobile Series Phone 7 is going to have it. I’m a little puzzled by why it hasn’t been part of the iPhone OS all along.
Best of all, it could probably be managed without any additional work from developers; perhaps just a flag in the info.plist file.
No background processing for third party apps, though.
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Other guesses/wishlist for OS 4:
- Mail overhaul with unified inbox
- Apple iChat for iPhone with front-face camera support
- User-definable information on the “lock” screen — see stopwatches and timers, weather, etc. at a glance
- A legible typeface for Notes
