ios7 keeps refreshing apps after switching

Just adding my issues here in hopes it gets attention from the powers that be

My Experience is as follows

Games - take your focus off the game and come back later and you have been refreshed out of a life and progress on current level. (I'll admit to playing Candy Crush when I have 5 idle minutes here and there )

Forms - Leave to get info on another page or app and come back to find your form emptied of previous entries.

Downloading Apps . take the focus off the app and it does not download in background as it did previously. Refocus to apps and page is refreshed to home page.

Facebook - since this is always on in background you may take a call, do work, etc and come back and now have refreshed what you left off with.

It is quite irritating and can not be called advantageous to the end user experience in any way. Maybe this frees up memory and makes the phone faster but at what cost?

SoundCloud restarts every time I leave my car where it was connected via Bluetooth or take a short two minute break where the phone is locked shortly then reopened. Never used to do that. I us d to be able to stop mid song and leave the vehicle or even on a Bluetooth headset and come back ever hours later and continue exactly where I left off. This is soo annoying especially when you have to sift thru multiple playlists to find that song you're still in the mood for!! Musi does the same but not as often. SoundCloud is ever single time you transition or multitask. Netflix almost never!!

Lawrence Finch wrote:

mylitesite wrote:

Does anyone know of any actual fixes to the problem?

What problem? It is working as designed.

Unhelpful as it sounds, I'm starting to think you're right. I think it's the apps that need to be fixed so that they resume their state when restarted after being kicked out of memory. Which means complaining to all those authors one by one.

I know Apple itself struggled with it for a while, and I've seen improvements in the Mail app that were making it painful to resume.

But perhaps the authors aren't that interested if the problem mainly affects older devices. Can anyone confirm that the problem is gone or reduced with more recent 2GB devices?

I that, given the problem is making iOS devices painful to use in general, Apple should be pressuring app authors to properly deal with resumes.

jordanemmet wrote:

I can confirm the same problem. I have an iPhone 7 running iOS 10.2 and my phone does this constantly- drives me crazy.

IPhone 7 has 2GB RAM, twice as much as my iPad 4. If doubling the RAM doesn't solve the problem, what do we do?

I'm interested to know how much RAM my apps are using. Does anyone know of an app that can tell me? That's working RAM, not storage.

2 GB of RAM won't solve the problem of poorly written apps, but it should reduce the frequency of the problem. Apps are always supposed to save their state to storage when exiting (unless you kill them from the quick launch screen). If they don't that's an issue for the app developer. I have 250 apps, and none of them exhibit this problem. So it's likely a minority of apps.

I'm new here and haven't read all 70pages, but can't believe that people say "it is working as designed"

I have the same problem on the 6plus with newest ios. did some testing and figured, that after 30 min or so when switching back to an app it is refreshing from start. It does refresh also maps app (deletes the address I have entered) photo app, music app and starts from scratch

It drives me crazy as well.

very basic scenario: I close all apps. So no RAM issue. Start maps app. enter an address for route planning. press the home button. wait 30 minutes. open app switcher (in the app switcher I see exactly where I left the app including my desired address) switch back to maps, it opens, shows me the app where I left it, BUT after one or two seconds it refreshes and starts the app from scratch. My address is gone! What exactly is here the reason for this behavior design?

The same with photos. I enter an album, scroll endlessly to some specific photos I want to show somebody, press the home button, (because I may need to do some other things until i want to return to the specific photos) and after 30 minutes or so I return to the photo app (again: in the app switcher the exact state is saved) but after switching back, the photo app reloads and shows the overview of the different albums.

Very annoying and it happens with almost all apps, excluding the calculator!!! - hey, this app saves the state you left, even after killing it - so it can be done, apple! You promised it: "When you switch back, you can pick up right where you left off"

And for all refresh lovers here: a simple refresh button or an auto refresh as an option would do it for you!

thanks for not reading but commenting. and sorry if my english has not your level.

I closed all apps just for testing reasons to exclude any RAM issue. it behaves the same way when more apps are open.

So it's designed since version iOS 7 ... I realized this after installing iOS 7. if there is enough RAM, then the pages do not reboot. If there is not enough RAM, the pages are erased from the main memory. In the version of iOS 6 and earlier, pages were saved in flash memory after switching applications. Then if you returned to safari, the page was copied from the flash memory to the RAM. Apparently it's done to encourage users to upgrade to newer versions of iPhones. In your iphone 6+ little RAM, very little. I am a former user of 6+. In the version of iOS 8/9/10 the iphone 6+ began to work much worse, that I had to change it to 7+. In iOS 10, my old iPhone 6+ could not store even 3 applications in RAM. Everything rebooted, even notes and a calculator.

Your English and grammar is fine. Lots of people frustrated with this same problem, even on stock apps such as Safari. When someone tells you to "never" do something I will usually suggest to ignore that advice. This is a frustration user experience for sure.

I'm a rebel. I just force closed an app and... (drum roll)... nothing bad happened. Or will happen. The sun is still shining. The birds are singing. Life is good. I may just force close another app just for the heck of it. Oh no! I may use a bit more battery life re-launching those apps. Gasp!

😁 to Moxiemoney

The explanations about the force-quitting-apps in IOS is clear and make sense.

What I wish is a technical information about the fact that the apps, when switching back to it, refreshing to the initial startup stage (ignoring and deleting whatever stage it was in). Is there someone who knows what he is talking about and not just guessing or telling nice stories? An Apple Expert?

What is the refreshing and deleting informations depending on? when I return to the Maps App after 20 minutes everything is fine. when I return to it after 40 minutes, it refreshes and deletes the addresses I previously entered. This is annoying. BUT Google Maps APP doesn't delete the last entered address. Even after hours and hours, it refreshes the app, but keeps the address! Maps.me behaves even worse then apple-Maps-APP, it deletes the addresses or the navigation route after some minutes already. The Calculator App keeps everything, even after force quitting the app! So what is the case? What can I do to be able to continue the work exactly where I left the app? Is it dependent on RAM? On the processor? I have the 6plus, but a friend has the iphone 7 and has the same problems. Is iOS 11 behaving the same annoying way?

So please some Apple Expert: anybody with some true knowledge?

Most posters with high point scores are Apple experts in one or more areas. Your question can be answered by studying the developer documentation. But the basic answer is that it is up to the app developer. iOS devices have 1 or 2 GB of RAM, depending on model. There is a sophisticated memory management module (actually, a Unix module) that optimizes the use of RAM. If space in RAM is needed by an app it first moves apps and data around in RAM. If that doesn't free enough RAM it will page out the oldest app and delete any RAM-resident data. These data are lost.

However, when you switch away from an app the app is suspended, and is given a chance to save its "volatile" data to its database. Apps that never lose data, like Google maps, probably always save all their current volatile data when they are suspended (unless you double-press the HOME button and swipe up to kill the app). Some apps save volatile data immediately; the calculator is an example. I don't know if Google Maps does also, but it might (rather than saving it when suspended). To find out what Google Maps does, try killing it. If it doesn't lose any data it must be saving it in real time.

There is really no reason for any app to lose data; saving data as you go along is easy and will not slow down the app significantly, because iOS devices have solid state storage. While it is slower than RAM, it is orders of magnitude faster than disk. An app that loses important data is a poorly written app. Note that some apps simply don't "think" that their volatile data are important, and don't bother to save it. As a user you may disagree with this decision for specific apps.

There is one other type of app that may not save volatile data - if they routinely save data to their servers. This requires an Internet connection, so these apps will lose data if they are paged out or terminated if they don't have an Internet connection at the time they are suspended.

Lawrence Finch wrote:

This just came across Slashdot today: Daring Fireball: Public Service Announcement: You Should Not Force Quit Apps on iOS

That's a great link. Maybe the people who wouldn't believe Federighi will believe Jobs.

Your explanation above is also excellent. Maybe a candidate for User tip?

Tell it to Apple: Apple - Feedback. We are just users like you.

GB

Yes. I have the same problem. It is a big problem for me. For instance, if I am entering information on some webforms, and I have to go to another app say, to find an address to put on the form, when I come back, the we page refreshes and I have lost everything I typed. :-(

Plus, if I had switched to "full website", when I leave and go back, the mobile site gets loaded instead.

Any ideas anyone? Maybe some option I am missing? Something else I'm doing wrong? iOS 7.0.2 here.