ios7 keeps refreshing apps after switching

Ditto - am very glad to hear the problem is also present on the iPad Air, which makes it more likely that Apple will take this problem seriously (or hopefully: IS taking it more seriously).

Curious that it seems to be less of a problem with the iPhone 5?

I have the problem on

iPhone 5

Ipad mini

Ipad2 & 3

I really don't see the need of multi-tasking on a mono view screen. Great my other web page on the other page is loading while I'm still on my current page but I can't see the other page until I click on it. Now it refreshes so I can't seem to understand what multitasking it is doing? It just has an annoying refresh on everything now.

I go to ebay and do a search for a product the go to amazon to look to see if they have it and when I go back to ebay the app refreshes to my home screen so I have to do the search over and get back to that same spot again. How annoying! I am hating switching between apps or tabs in safari now.

Is this a bug or do the developers not know what multitasking is?

I hope they get this fixed... Because I remember when Apple stood for was "It just works"

Exact same issue here with the eBay app. Unreal.

Tried reading a linked-in forum thread with 100 posts. Every time I was interrupted or checked an incoming e-mail, bam, straight to the top of the thread. If that's working as intended, EVERYBODY needs to know it before buying Apple products this Christmas season. Freaking worthless pOS iOS.

The reason Apple will not even recognize this is a problem is because it makes them money. Hard core Apple lovers will put up with any problem just so long as they have their beloved, can't do anything wrong Apple product. Apple does not care about the few of us out here complaining. We're the exceptions. We can see the emperor has no clothes but our phone companies have us over a barrel with phone products. Bottom line is we are under a contract to put up with whatever Apple dishes out. The only choice we have is to let Apple and the phone companies have their way with us. What do they care? We all keep paying our phone bill every month. Seriously, unless we talk with our pocket books, no one is going to listen. My hard core apple friends will not even acknowledge that this is a new flaw. They have been using iOS7 for a couple of months and are so "Oh Gee Wowed" with the new web interface, they have totally forgotten how it worked in iOS6. Of course they were the folks standing in line in the rain overnight to get the iPhone 5 when it hit the stores. They are blind to anything wrong with their new product as it would further justify the criticism from folks that didn't have to have the latest product on the very first day. I wish I'd never bought this phone. It's my first and last Apple product. Take a bite out of the Apple and make a statement. I challenge each of you to commit to not buying another Apple product if Apple does not fix this problem before your contract with your provide expires. Make Apple care with your wallet. Let them know that you can see that they have no clothes on. Don't just blindly accept what they dish out.

I'm also very glad to hear that the issue affects new iPads and iPhones, as it means Apple are likely to be motivated to investigate and fix the problem.

I doubt many of us will be buying any more Apple iOS hardware until the issue is resolved.

I've found another mention of the issue at http://forums.imore.com/ios-7/269721-ios-7-apps-reset-refresh-themselves-lose-th eir-place-after-switching-back-them.html

Not sure how the industry groups keep score on Internet traffic by device type but I wonder if this issue makes iOS devices look far more prevalent vs. other devices-- particularly in the tablet market. Just following the money.....

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Refreshing the web page unnecessarily probably increases hit counts. Sells more extended data plans, etc....

Just to add, for what it's worth -- I think the memory management hypothesis is probably right. It would be consistent with what I experience that some kind of system process keeps sucking up more and more memory until there's effectively nothing left and the OS has to juggle one app at a time.

I don't it would be an app that has the memory leak because then the app would just get killed, and we wouldn't see the issue afterwards. I dunno, just a thought.

To add one more data point to the hypothesis -- in choosing what apps to kill, iOS seems to (smartly) protect a backgrounded app that is currently playing audio. For example, if I background the NPR app while looking at a (written) news story to do anything else - send an email, read a text - I will come back and the app will reload. But if I am listening to an NPR stream and background it to do something, when I come back, it is as I left it.

But even so, I have been able to force the issue by opening enough "large" apps while NPR plays in the background. I think I did something like start a stream, then open up Google Maps, give it directions, and switch to Facebook. It (a Verizon 4S) ground to a halt and then the audio died.

I wouldn't be surprised if iOS also prioritizes Maps/Google Maps staying alive over other, "lesser" apps -- the difference is we don't know when iOS finally kills Maps because there's no (constant) audio stream that we hear stop.

Memory issues is what I am seeing. This was a half-day sequence:

After a reboot, this was what I saw coming in:

It was still high, but pay most attention to the Wired and System memory. I then used the the app to kill processes and free up memory:

I then procceded to use the phone as normal. This included using the web to read the news and watch some videos, check the weather, do e-mail, listen to podcasts, and (shocker) make phone calls! So, nothing to huge. At the end of this activitiy, the issue was quite prevalent (which it was not after the reboot). Taking a look at the memory, I saw this:

Look how much the system memory went up! So I did the memory clear again:

But even after several clears, this was the best I could get:

Even after all that, the System memory would not release and the issue persisted. As soon as I started running anything, the system memory would jump up, leaving no memory for active and inactive apps. By the end of the day, things just continued to get worse:

So I stand by that something in IOS7 is taking over system memory and just staying there. It is not there at the beginning when you reboot, so it just piles on as the day moves on.

And as someone said above, I'm voting with my wallet. I was not planning on upgrading so soon and was waiting for the next generation Windows Phone (I'm well past due for an upgrade and new contract, so I have complete freedom), but this is a push out the doot to me. Thankfully I intentionally kept myself out of much of Apple's ecosystem for just such an occurance. Will I lose some things and have to rebuy some apps? Sure, I suppose so. But at the end of day this is an unusable system for normal daily use, and therefore is costing me way more money the longer I hold on.

Nice analysis, babsonnexus. This looks pretty conclusive - iOS 7 has got some serious issues. I can understand your inclination to jump ship. I have been a long-standing Apple advocate though my enthusiasm starting waning with iOS 6's problems and now iOS 7. Are the best days of Apple behind them? I do hope not - I rather like their ecosystem.

I hope to contact Apple tomorrow to raise the profile.

I can't find the term "system memory" (as used in the cMemory app) defined anywhere. Other memory apps I've tried just seem to report an undefined difference between the total (used + free) and the amount of physical memory. I've found a comment on stackexchange (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5012886/knowing-available-ram-on-an-ios-devic e) that states:

"Please note that this call [retrieving memory stats] does not account for memory that is being used by the gpu. If you are seeing a size that is smaller than expected system ram. It is more than likely allocated graphics memory."

So, perhaps this "system memory" is in fact memory in use by the GPU, which could be a lot more in iOS 7 than it was in iOS 6, even despite me turning every enhancement off that I can.

Which could mean it is "working as designed", it's just that the design is fundamentally flawed on a device with such limited physical memory when the OS has no paging memory model.

It could indeed be a fundamental design flaw, paulfromstone, though this is also a problem on the IPad Air and iPhone 5 so that would make it a pretty major one.

This morning I contacted an Apple Store who put me through to a support person who in turn put me through to an iOS Senior Advisor. She has taken all my details and got me to email her a link to this thread. This will then go to the appropriate support/dev group. She will contact me with any response.

I have a support case number so that I can chase it up later if necessary. The more of us that raise this as a serious problem, the more likely it will be that Apple will take notice.

It might also be helpful if we could get one of the Tech sites interested in this. Does anyone have any contacts?

FYI, I was sent an auto-generated email after contacting support that included the following:

<clip>

Have you tried Express Lane?

Jump start your next support call by creating a case online first. Let us know the best time to reach you, and we'll connect you to an Apple Advisor who has the answers. Put yourself in the driver's seat and check out Express Lane today!

https://expresslane.apple.com/LocaleChange.action

</clip>

I've sent out some cold messages to various tech sites and linked them to this thread. Hopefully a few will follow-up and the others will take their lead! However, if anyone knows an author or has a more direct connection, the more messages, the better in this case.

Don't know if it will help but just sent short details and link to this thread to CNN using iphone CNN app/Story Ideas.

If more people do the same, they may test it and publish a story under CNN tech section.

One way to get a solution :)

It is ok if there is no fix for this on IOS7.

Apple should just let people to go back to IOS6, which worked fine.