From the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" Page 35 (of the PDF) - Section 12 - Bullet (a): "Give lengthy and incomprehensible explanations when questioned."
To you it may be completely OK to drain your iPhone battery in 3 hours to have your IM or IRC client running in the background checking every 5 minutes for a new message. It might be completely OK that other applications would want the exact same privilege. And that's because you're application developers and you only see it from your point of view.
But what about Johnny Knowsnothing that installs the app from The App Store and finds that his iPhone battery suddenly sucks? Do they understand the state of application development enough to blame you, the application designer? I don't think so. They blame Apple. They cry out that their battery life sucks and demand Apple fixes the issue. Apple starts replacing batteries that don't need replacing and that increases cost. All because you didn't understand that the iPhone isn't a desktop and requires a different approach to your application design.
I believe that eventually some of these issues may be cleared up with better radio technologies for EDGE and WiFi but right now I'd much rather have an 8-hour battery life than IM running in the background.
