Most AI coding assistants are demoed on a desk: laptop plugged in, stable Wi-Fi, full attention. But the moment I approve or monitor a long-running AI task from a phone, the environment becomes hostile — the app gets backgrounded, the device hops from Wi-Fi to LTE, iOS starts throttling background execution, and the battery drops below 20%.
This article is a reproducible benchmark method for one question: does an AI coding task survive the mobile lifecycle, and can you tell the difference between 'recovered', 'restarted', and 'silently dropped'?
Test environment (record yours)
Device: iPhone 14, iOS 17.x (note your exact build)
App state: task started from the foreground, screen unlocked
