Damien

I remain skeptical it'll work at a large scale. We'll need to see what people who've gone though the source code have found out.

The problem remains that iOS doesn't allow apps to broadcast out in the background. It listens but it doesn't send. The theory was that the developers used this to allow Android phones to 'wake' the iPhones again by asking them to do something.

Maybe the developers have found a way to do this with iOS apps too but that would essentially mean they're using a dodgy workaround to make iPhones ping each other, keeping the app alive, allowing them to ping for a bit longer. In other words it depends on a critical mass of phones constantly pinging each other to stay alive, the app will consistently be on the verge of terminating.

So in real world use the questions will be if this can hold up when moving in and out of range constantly, if airplane mode will terminate it, if iOS moves it out of memory if it backgrounds for too long, how often the app needs to be opened and so on.

If they really have found a solution that works credit to them and I doubt Apple will patch it out just yet as the PR would be damaging. However anyone building on a loophole in the system should expect that loophole to be closed either intentionally on unintentional.