I used to think "real" multitasking is a necessary feature for me, but when I think it deeper, the Android has as good multitasking as Maemo/Meego. 1) In Android, if you want your application to do something also when in the background, you should code a separate service thread which has the code which can be run also in the background. For example, you won't put any GUI-drawing or refreshing code in that thread.