Performing operations in the background

Since one of the main goals of UWP is to enable developers to write apps that are respectful of the system resources, its background model is quite restrictive compared to the Win32 one. As we highlighted in the Controlling the application's life cycle section, applications aren't able to freely run in the background, but they are automatically suspended after a few seconds of inactivity. Background activities are still supported but through a unique feature called background tasks, which are independent snippets of code that can perform operations in the background when a specific trigger happens (every 15 minutes, when the user connects to the internet, and so on).

The Windows App SDK, being part of the Win32 ecosystem, removes most of the restrictions around background activities. The biggest one is that applications aren't suspended anymore when they are minimized, which makes it possible to continue running tasks in the...