Loopt and AT&T broke the game rules

A location-based service (LBS) is an information or entertainment service for mobile devices that uses the user's geographical position. There are many applications of mobile services, in a variety of contexts, such as health, work, personal life, etc. For example, thanks to LBS it is possible to discover the nearest banking cash machine, or the whereabouts of a friend.

There are hundreds of apps for the iPhone that provide location-based services, most of them combining these services with social networks. However, since third-party iPhone apps can’t run in the background due to limitations of iPhone’s SDK, it was not possible for those apps to update a user’s location in real-time.

Recently, one of the existing location based application, called Loopt, has managed to solve this limitation. How they did it? Well, they have reached an agreement with AT&T that will allow them to monitor a user’s location in the background and so, they don’t have to run the application all the time. In this way, Loopt can send you a text message if you are close to something that could be interesting for you, or you can monitor you friends' location in real-time. Everything even if Loopt app is not running.

It is very nice to see that finally those real time location based services have reached the iPhone. However, we thing that now the game is not fair, that Loopt and AT&T broke the rules. We are also iPhone application developers, and we would like to provide real time location based services as well, because we have very nice ideas about what kind of services we could offer to our customers. We think that the possibilities are endless. But we can't develop them, because AT&T does not allow us to do that.

We think that Apple should reconsider its policy about background applications, or that AT&T should offer the same user's monitoring service to all the developers. At the end, it is the user how will get the benefits with all those wonderful services and applications.