[grbalaffa]

Yeah although a big question is: what will that do to battery life? People who install lots of gimmicky, frequently-updated apps and forget about them after trying them once will suddenly be at a loss as to why their device suddenly doesn't hold a charge as long as it did before.

I fear the auto-update feature combined with multitasking will drastically reduce the typical battery life of an iOS device.

[kemiller]

Nothing indicated that updates would be instantaneous. It can wait until the phone is plugged in. They also seem to have gone out of their way to minimize battery impact. Apps lifecycles are still controlled by the system, which can presumably decide to suspect those activities if things get dire.

[jonhmchan]

That's very true. Though, given the volume of apps and the frequency of updates, I doubt it creates nearly as big of a battery suck than constant background running apps do (I'm looking at you Facebook).

Another point is that unless updates are being pushed constantly, I don't see why it would suddenly kill battery life more so than if they were pulled - it is just the timing of when to do updates (over time or "update all" as a batch - I doubt people actually distribute their updates according to battery usage).