First off - I have read and fully understand this post - Apple doesn't want us abusing users' hardware so as to maximize the quality of experience across apps for their customers. I am 100% on board with this philosophy, I understand all design decisions and agree with them.
To the problem:
I have an app that takes photo assets, processes them for network (exportSession.shouldOptimizeForNetworkUse = true), and then uploads them. Some users have been having trouble, did some digging, they're trying to upload 4K 60FPS videos. I think that is ridiculous, but it's not my place.
The issue is that the export time for a 4K60FPS video that is ~40s long can be as long as 2m. So if they select a video to upload, and then background the app that upload will ALWAYS fail because the processing fails (I have BG uploads working just fine). My understanding is that default I have 30s to run things in the background. I can use UIApplication.pleasegivemebackgroundtime to request up to 30 more seconds. That is obviously not enough.
So my second option is BGProcessingTask - but that's not guaranteed to run ever. Which I understand and agree with, but when the user selects a video while the app is in the foreground the expectation is that it immediately begins processing. So I can't use a BGProcessingTask?
Just wondering what the expected resolution here is. I run tasks, beg for time, if it doesn't complete I queue up a BGTask that may or may not ever run? That seems ****** for a user - they start the process, see it begin, but then if the video is too big they just have to deal with it possibly just not happening until later? They open up the app and the progress bar has magically regressed. That would infuriate me.
Is there another option I'm not seeing? Some way to say "this is a large background task that will ideally take 30-60s, but it may take up to ~5-7m. It is user-facing though so it must start right away"? (I have never seen 5-7m, but 1-2m is common)
Another option is to just upload the full 4K60FPS behemoth and do the processing on my end, but that seems worse for the user? We're gobbling upload bandwidth for something we're going to downsample anyway. Seems worse to waste data than battery (since that's the tradeoff at the end of the day).
Anyway, just wondering what the right way to do this is. Trivially reproducible - record 1m 4K60FPS video, create an export session, export, background, enjoy failure.
