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Cannot use background-audio multitasking to perform other operations unless you play music while doing so

This is great:

… Paul came up with an idea that would actually allow Pastebot to run in the background. … The idea is to have a silent audio clip play in the background. This would use one of Apple’s backgrounding APIs that allows music to play in the background. Turns out it works flawlessly. … Rejected. It wasn’t what we hoped for, but to be honest it was expected. We aren’t allowed to play a silent audio clip in the background. … They have rules to follow to keep the background services from being used in ways they were not intended to. Fair enough. In the rejection letter, Apple gave us two options:

  1. Provide audible content to the user while running in the background
  2. Remove the audio from the background

… Why don’t we just let our users select a song from their music library to play in the background?

No word yet on whether this will make it through. (Our guess: it won’t.) But it’s quite interesting if it does. Still, we cannot recommend that you rely on this for any core functionality of your app, as Apple could decide to reject workarounds like this at any time.