I should have known better than to get drawn into this discussion. You're right that no one in this thread specifically stated that these are brand new ideas, but you can't argue that people are stating that it was bad in Android but good in iOS. It all comes back to the user choice vs walled garden argument. There's the Android way of doing it, and the Apple way of doing it. You say it's a significant difference; the difference is simply in Apple not letting people do something they could do in Android. The parts that overlap are almost exactly the same. Think of how many people believe that the iPod was the first MP3 player, the iPhone was the first smartphone, and the iPad was the first tablet. Do you think that's by mistake, or because Apple really wants people to think that? How often on HN do I hear people making the claim that Apple beat Microsoft to the tablet and smartphone game? [1]
"On Android can't the app just run forever and decide on its own how often to poll the servers? This is a different thing. The OS decides when to schedule things if the app supports it. What may have been true years ago isn't necessarily an issue anymore."
vs
"When a competitor does it and Apple says they won't, it's the worst thing in the world. Once the competitor proves its worth and Apple does it, it's now the best thing ever"
Sure I'm using hyperbole, but I think I adequately summed up the argument. xutopia implied that Android's battery life suffered from having background jobs running, and that this was a bad thing. Since Apple is only letting the jobs run at predefined intervals and all at the same time to save battery life, this is a good thing. That is exactly "it was bad when Android was doing it, and it's good when iOS is doing it". I accept that perhaps he didn't know how Android's background scheduler works, but that still says to me "background tasks are a bad thing except when Apple does it."
You're also conveniently ignoring that I called out just about everyone who had responded at that point, not just xutopia. xutopia's comment was the least offensive of all of them, and I certainly understand his argument. Apple is doing it in one of the many correct ways. It's not, however, significantly different from how Android recommends developers accomplish the same task. The only difference is, on Android this is discretionary and on iOS this is enforced. Neither of these are bad things.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6264617
This is a discussion I participated in not that long ago where people were legitimately stating that Windows Mobile and Windows tablets don't count because the iPhone and Android phones look different and have faster processors. I just gave up.