There have been a lot of discussions on TMO about Android's "multitasking". I don't think you can open a terminal, type for i in `cat sites.txt`; do wget $i; done, go away and expect the wget to constantly run until all your URL's in sites.txt are retrieved.

That is quite a crude example, but it's what a real multitasking OS is about. I really hope Jolla doesn't go the Android way. I don't know how Linus even accepted Google's broken approach to multitasking in the kernel. Sailfish already provides the ability to inform the process whether it's in the foreground or not (like a lot of windows managers in Linux, for what it's worth), so as a programmer one should react accordingly.

If an application is rubbish at behaving in a mobile environment, then it shouldn't be used, don't worry, the users will figure that out sooner or later and another one will surpass it. The OS shouldn't be designed taking into consideration programmers's laziness, IMNSHO, or we'll end up with Windows again. Hell, Android is the Windows of the mobile world - it requires the biggest HW, it consumes most of the battery, you name it.

I do appreciate that battery life is very limited in the mobile world lately, but that is changing and will dramaticlaly improve over the years. What will Google do then? How will they go back to the traditional preemptive multitasking? Will they rewrite all the applications and services themselves?

There are already a few folks in this thread that will be missing the ability of the browser to load several pages concurrently, like the N9 does, in the Sailfish browser. Yes, it uses more battery, but it's beautiful, and it's something that the likes of iOS cannot do, and I can't speak for Android there as I haven't tried their latest browser (pre-Chrome ones couldn't pull that off either). The mobile user shoudn't be patronised either, so let them choose whether to run multiple applications at the same time or not.

I apolgise if I sound angry, but I do feel very strongly against crippled multitasking as I do use my phone as such and as a computer, so I don't like Apple's and Google's approach to what they call multitasking.