I hadn’t heard of this app called Backgrounder until AJ and Chuck mentioned it in the comments a few days back in another post. This app allows you to run apps that you got from the app store in the background on your iPhone. If you don’t know what this means, just think about how you can use the iPod app on your iPhone and the music will keep playing if you go out of it and starting texting or surfing the web. That is pretty cool how that works.
This is a great function to have, especially since a lot of apps can be a pain if you can’t also use them in the background. For example, it really sucks having to close the radio app you are listening to when you get a text or want to check something in safari. Up until now, that was always the case.
Two great apps that this works with is WunderRadio and BeeJiveIM. If you run backgrounder with BeeJiveIM going, you basically get push alerts. It is awesome. I think I’m going to stayed signed in 24/7 now.
Once you install Backgrounder, an icon doesn’t pop up on your springboard like most other apps. To toggle backgrounder on and off, simply open the program you want to run in the background, when you want to go out of that program but keep it running, hold the home screen until this message pops up:
Once that message pops up, just release the home button and the program will close, but will remain running in the background. If you want to turn off backgrounder, go back into the program, and hold the home button until this message pops up:
Backgrounder is another reason in the ever growing list of reasons to jailbreak your iPhone 3G.
Here’s a demo of Backgrounder in action:
Backgrounder is available right now in Cydia. Just search for ‘backgrounder’ using the search tab.
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October 9th, 2008 at 5:16 am
this would be great but imo you will be killing your battery
October 9th, 2008 at 6:01 am
@SK13 Ruff doesnt need a battery.. he runs on the power of the sun! lol
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im running OEM firmware at the moment, until i go into the apple store on saturday and do the swap.. i wanna look like i been using this for awhile. then its back to jailbreak
Though your apps open quicker then mine did on jailbreak ruff.. :(
October 9th, 2008 at 7:58 am
Just get installed! Works great so far!
Thanks for letting us know about this app.
October 9th, 2008 at 8:58 am
Very cool app indeed! Thanks Ruff. One thing - I wish there was a way you could easily tell what apps you still have running. Like once you activate backgrounder and go back to the springboard … if you’ve used backgrounder on a few apps … there’s no way to identify which ones are still running.
October 9th, 2008 at 9:27 am
been deliberating whether to jailbreak or not, and this might just do it… odd thing is that yesterday I thought about how great it is if an app will allow me to do just this, listen to last.fm while texting and such…. this is great, now I don’t have to search for one :)
October 9th, 2008 at 9:50 am
sonicblue82: I believe a GUI is in the works.
This app is great, i think 3rd party apps tend to work better with it as appstore apps aren’t always stable running in the background.
October 9th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
A gui for this would be great, it is hard to tell what is backgrounded and what is not. I have to check everytime, but it is still a good function.
October 9th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Thanks for metioning my name lol. This is a really great app and now we don’t need Apple’s push service.
October 9th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Oh btw what happened to the contest results???
October 9th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Sorry for the triple post but i just realized that the contest results are at 11:59PM not AM lol.
October 9th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
I’ve been using it for a while now and it doesn’t work very well with half of my apps.
October 9th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Well at first it worked with BeejiveIM perfectly, now it doesn’t seem to work that well.