There are numerous iPhone apps that don't need push notifications and sync just fine.

"Open source programmers do not understand how to code properly for iOS" != "doing things in the background is IMPOSSIBLE on iOS!!!!!"

People just love to screech about iOS/Apple being evil.

Could come from Apple publicly saying a while back that killing apps doesn't save battery life because apps can't wake in the background. Might be sound advice not to kill apps, but part of that was factually untrue.