Opportunistic Multitasking

Services for a personal electronic device are provided through which a form of background processing or multitasking is supported. The disclosed services permit user applications to take advantage of background processing without significant negative consequences to a user's experience of the foreground process or the personal electronic device's power resources. To effect the disclosed multitasking, one or more of a number of operational restrictions may be enforced. A consequence of such restrictions may be that a process will not be able to do in the background state, what it may be able to do if it were in the foreground state. Implementation of the disclosed services may be substantially transparent to the executing user applications and, in some cases, may be performed without the user application's explicit cooperation.