Why Newton requires Background App Refresh?
Whenever your iPhone gets a new mail notification (visible notification) from Newton Cloud, iOS wakes up the Newton app in the background and gives it a small window of time to sync the new mail from the server. This way, by the time you open the app to read the new mail, it’s already halfway downloaded. Similarly, for every other change in the email server, an invisible notification is sent to your iPhone notifying the change; E.g. when a mail is read from another device, deleted, read receipts updated, low priority mails moved etc. On receipt of this notification also, iOS is expected to wake up the app in the background and give some time for it to sync the changes and then go back to sleep.
But it’s not that straight forward. iOS wakes up apps in the background based on a lot of factors like visible vs invisible notification, how frequently the app is used, how frequently it’s updated, whether the phone is on Wifi or data, battery level etc. Even if the app is woken up, the duration assigned for it to sync is also fuzzy. Background sync for a 3rd party iOS app is not 100% guaranteed. Disabling Background App Refresh only makes it worse.
If the Background App Refresh setting is disabled for Newton, iOS will never wake up Newton in the background. In any scenario. This means every notification it receives from the server goes ignored by the app. The only time the app gets to connect to the server and sync changes is when you launch it. Now, as the app hasn't received any of the notifications that came in, it has to process a lot of changes for it come to the present state. This will make the app unstable and unusable for sometime. You’ll see a lot of jumping around. Even if you see a stable inbox, it may still be doing a lot of processing in the background. But unfortunately it all stops abruptly the moment you close the app. Eventually the app will have a lot of backlog to sync whenever it opens and the experience deteriorates, by when you will send us a mail complaining.
Disabling Background App Refresh should be done only for that rogue app you really don’t trust to do anything in the background without your knowledge. Usually your phone will have apps that you trust and hence I don’t think you should meddle with this setting, for the best app experience. For a productivity app like Newton, it’s absolutely important that it gets a chance to sync in the background and be upto-date, for it to work as designed. iOS is anyway doing its job to optimise background refresh of apps so that your iPhone’s performance is not affected.
In iOS, there’s no guaranteed way for a 3rd party app to sync in the background. This setting only makes it worse.
In the last update, we had started showing a persistent banner for those who have turned off Background App Refresh for Newton. As usual we got people complaining about it and some of them, even after explaining what’s happening, didn't want to change anything. So in the current update, we’ve changed it to remind you only a day after your dismiss the banner. We will stop showing it if you dismiss it a couple of times. It’s ultimately your call.