iOS Background Fetching can be Expensive
Posted February 24th, 2014 @ 11:24am by Erik J. Barzeski
Michael Tsai - Blog - iOS Background Fetch
My first example of this was when I added Background Fetch to Check the Weather. A weather app's primary function is displaying up-to-the-minute, constantly changing data so in my initial iOS 7 update I experimented with adding highly frequent background updates. The result was far more dramatic than I'd expected. Here are my weather API requests (which cost 0.01ยข per request) per day once the update went live. I saw an immediate jump in traffic, roughly 16x normal. Suffice to say I immediately had to scale back on my requested update frequency.
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