Is there a way to close all applications with one button

the apps are not really open n running. it is just a recently used list. the apps are in a hibernated state in the flash n not in memory. (except a few core ones like music, messages, etc)

Sorry there isn't a one button to close all the applications. You would have to close it out like how Apple tech does it.

well they don't know ..trust me. they are not that geniuses. the way it works is by design.. as jobs himself explained.. if you use a task manager, you've lost it. 😁

killing non-background apps (basically anything that is not a inbuilt core app) does nothing to the memory or processor because they are not running in the first place!

Dear electronics guy (and anyone else who regurgitates what Apple tells you),

This isn't a debate and isn't a matter of opinion. Apps in the background (running, hibernating, or whatever) DO ABSOLUTELY take up memory. When the phone gets low enough on memory, it runs like poo.

I'm not endorsing Jailbreaking by any means, but anyone that has done it can show you concrete proof, in screen shots, of memory being eaten up and processes still running. They can also show you that as you kill those processes, memory usage drops. They can show you how an app responds while memory is being hogged and when you free up the memory (without ever leaving the app) how it is suddenly nice and snappy.

A 16GB iPhone 4 has 512 MB of RAM. On a fresh boot it will have ~290-300MB of RAM free for other applications. Over time, sitting on a home screen, the amount of RAM available can get as low as 20 MB. The phone runs like a turd-le. A simple respring or killing background processes (not including phone, music, messages and safari) can make a world of difference.

Apple can claim that 'if you see a task manager, you're doing it wrong' or whatever, but clearly they are not doing it quite right if the phone's performance can be severely impacted. Furthermore, why should they care if we want an app to kill apps? If they made an easy way to respring, we would be happy and they don't have to worry about unsigned apps.

When the phone gets low enough on memory, it runs like poo.

When the phone gets low on memory, the OS automatically purges the least recently used app(s) to free up memory.

Of course opening apps uses memory and closing apps frees up memory. That's obvious. But manually closing apps is not something you normally need to do as the OS is designed to manage memory automatically.

Julian,

I'm not trying to argue with anyone, but I can show you screen shots that show the phone dangerously low on memory. When that happens, strange things happen. Some apps will run really slow. (I play an addicting dice game called Farkle and the dice roll rediculously slow) Some apps won't run at all. They try to open and crash. (Facebook, WatchESPN and SlingPlayer come to mind) When you look in the process manager, you see old stuff still running. When you kill those tasks, you will see the available memory climb back up. I don't ever kill phone, messages, etc. (system apps). Once you have some memory freed up, then those very same apps perform as expected.

If the OS is supposed to automatically purge applications and manage memory automatically, it does a craptastic job of it. The phone becomes practically unusable until memory is purged. All Apple has to do is say, "you shouldn't ever need this, but just in case, here's a handy respring option." It's way faster than a full reboot and accomplishes the same goal. ****, just give me the option to decide which apps I want to run in the background and which I don't. I personally don't care if Facebook runs in the background but I sure as **** don't want solitare and Farkle and all of my other time wasters just sitting there taking up precious resources. I don't even fault Apple over this. It's more likely the fault of the various app coders. I just want a way to fix the problem.

Question: Has anyone ever had their phone feel warm for seemingly no reason? (screen dark, haven't been using it, etc) It's because of something running in the background. Kill the processes and the phone will cool down. I've seen it time and time again.

I've never experienced any of the issues you list. But then again, my phone is not jailbroken, which I'm guessing yours must be if you're running process monitoring/killing apps.

The jailbreak is probably causing the problems you think its allowing you to fix!.

What are these processes running in the background when it gets warm?

How many recently used apps do you have to have to get down to the low memory counts you are claiming?

Julian,

Your statement and the use of an exclamation point comes across as arrogant and accusatory. You act like you know more about phones and iOS in general, yet you said yourself that you have never jailbroken a phone. To claim that something you know nothing about is what is causing my problem is a pretty ignorant statement. Maybe you do know more, but I'm not trying to judge or insinuate anything with my comments.

I have 2 identical iPhone 4 phones; mine and my wife's. Mine is jailbroken while hers is not and never has been. Last night I did a little test. I opened a bunch of apps (same apps, same versions) on both phones and monitored the memory usage while doing so. Both were from a fresh boot, so I have to assume that available memory was similar. I can't quite know for sure because I cannot see the memory usage on her phone, but the results were similar, so I believe that they were the same at the start.

Here's the list of apps I opened. With each app, I didn't just open it and close it. I played around in each one and performed their various functions. The number in ( ) is the free memory before app loading (or after "closing" the previous app and launching a new one) and the number in [ ] is the free memory while in the app. I didn't "close" any app using a process killer, just simply hit the home button and waited a few seconds before launching a new app.

(298MB starting)

Facebook [239] (268) - Facebook is a memory hog (at least initially). Only about half reclaimed.

WatchESPN [240] (242) - Not much reclaimed

App Store [205] (209) - also a bloated pig

Mint.com [191] (194)

Farkle [180] (190)

Hanging w/ friends [101] (106) - Both phones are starting to feel a little sluggish at this point.

FamilyFeud&Frnds [67] (74)

YouTube [43] (107) - Interesting to note this ~105MB. You'll see why soon.

Camera [20] (103) - Here it is again.

Wootstar [74] (51) - Why did it drop again after closing it? Poor app coding?

Facebook, again [47] (50)

Maps (iOS5 ver) [31] (65)

Yahoo Sportacular [40] (42)

TheWeatherChan [31] (38)

Farkle, again [28] (37)

Angry Birds Seas [20] (23) - Took a reeaaallllyyy long time to load

Light (turns on led) [106] (109) - This had a really long load and delayed reaction, but then memory jumped.

Analysis: Both phones behaved pretty similarly, so I can't see any detectable evidence that the memory issues are due to it being jailbroken. (I really only run jailbroken for sbsettings which allows handy access to do things that Apple should already allow us. Instant access to turn Wifi, Bluetooth, Airplane Mode, VPN, Location on and off. Also, I can quickly adjust my brightness. It's a pain to go digging in the settings app everytime you need to do these things and these are all things an android can natively do.) I monitored the process in between app changes and ALL of them stayed running in the background EXCEPT for Farkle. It would be gone after I closed it.

One interesting thing I noted was that when the memory reached some arbitrary low point, something would free up some memory to the around 103-107MB range. It's cool that it did that, but did didn't do it consistently. Sometimes it would do it around the 40MB mark and others waited until the dangerously low 20MB mark. When it reclaimed it, it only did it to around the ~105MB mark which is 1/3 of what I started with; ~300MB.

After I was done, I closed all background process except for phone, messages, etc. and the memory went back to just ABOVE 300MB.

Conclusion: Apple has a built in flushing system, but it waits until it's really backed up. When it flushes it only partially does so and the phone can get pretty clogged between flushes. When the flushes happen, no one really knows.

I re-read one of my earlier posts and think it's funny that Apple sensors the word (HE-double hockey sticks). There's twice when I used that oh-so-vulgar word and it replaced it with ****. Let's see if the filters can catch h-e-l-l. (just typed it with hyphens in between) I guess apple all believes in heaven only and not Hades. 🙂

you said yourself that you have never jailbroken a phone

No, I didn't. I said my phone is not jailbroken (using the present tense). That does not mean I have never jailbroken an iOS device. Speaking from my own experience, jailbreaking causes more problems than it fixes - hence why my current phone is not jailbroken.

Perhaps you'll find this interesting: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/MemoryMg mt/Articles/MemoryMgmt.html

There's a lot of poorly written apps out there.

JW,

You're right. My appologies. I mistook what you said about not experencing the issues to not having experience...

Also, I did find that page very interesting.

And, lastly, we agree that there are tons of poorly written apps out there. All I'm asking for is a way to kill those poorly written apps at the core level. It doesn't have to be a full blown task manager, though that'd be nice because you can usually tell which ones are the resource hogs and just kill them. It could be a simple "Respring" or "Refresh" button, or Apple could set the threshold higher so that you always have plenty of RAM available to run apps, even the poorly written, leaky ones. If it flushed when the threshold got to 100MB (instead of 20MB-40MB) and went up to 200MB free (instead of 100MB) then when you open those hoggy apps, the rest of the phone experience doesn't go to pot.

you can keep arguing. point is non-core apps do not run in background RAM memory. they are 'hibernated' onto the flash memory. the list you see is not a current applications list. it is the recently used apps list.

killing non-core apps will not change RAM utilization. the OS handles that on demand.

@electronicsguy - is that why pandora continues to play music for me when i close out of it? No RAM used at all by that?