I am looking for a way to have an iPhone application run in the background indefinitely. This app will not be using location services or VoIP, but instead be preforming a specific task (sorry but I cannot explicitly say what the task is). The task can be comparable to checking to see if a file exists and then sleeping for 1 second. For the purpose of this question, the task should be running forever.
Any help would be appreciated. As far as I can tell from iPhone documentation what I am requesting is not possible, so I am rather stumped…
You’re right — unless your reason for running in the background fits within one of the categories that Apple has defined (playing audio, voip, etc.), your app won’t be allowed to run indefinitely in the background. If the reason you want to do that is really compelling, you might want to talk to Apple about getting them to allow it. Expect a long uphill battle, though. A more pragmatic approach would be to look for ways that you can achieve the same effect, like running your background code on a server or registering for various notifications from the system.