How to keep an iPhone app running on background fully operational

Question

first of all, I know there is only support for voip, audio and location apps to run in background and that they will run just while the audio is been played or while using location services, etc.

What I want to know is if there is a way to keep my app running on background fully operational, doesn't matter the impact on battery's life.

That way the user of my app can select from settings to keep alive the app whenever he wants and just for the amount of time he wish. e.g if he is waiting for something that requires the app to be running, after receiving the messages he can turn off the keep alive functionality.

I don't know if this is possible but I had read some post that say so but unfortunately they didn't say how to =(

UPDATE: In this tutorial, I found that Acrobits has two apps on the Apple Store that "can force the application to stay alive and awake in the background". So there is a way to do this?

Answer 1

From ioS 7 onwards, there are newer ways for apps to run in background. Apple now recognizes that apps have to constantly download and process data constantly.

Here is the new list of all the apps which can run in background.

1. Apps that play audible content to the user while in the background, such as a music player app
2. Apps that record audio content while in the background.
3. Apps that keep users informed of their location at all times, such as a navigation app
4. Apps that support Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
5. Apps that need to download and process new content regularly
6. Apps that receive regular updates from external accessories

You can declare app's supported background tasks in Info.plist using X Code 5+. For eg. adding UIBackgroundModes key to your app’s Info.plist file and adding a value of 'fetch' to the array allows your app to regularly download and processes small amounts of content from the network. You can do the same in the 'capabilities' tab of Application properties in XCode 5 (attaching a snapshot)

You can find more about this in Apple documentation