ios7 keeps refreshing apps after switching

I still think it is working exactly as Apple planned.

I find it hard to believe beta testers did not find this. However, my girlfriend for example, doesn’t think it’s a problem. It depends on how you use the phone. She is perfectly happy with it doing what it does. She would cut off her right arm before admitting her beloved Apple device had a bug.

I’m still going on the cynical side. I think it is financially motivated. The phone companies and Apple are making money off of us because our apps refreshing causes an inflated number of hits on web pages, therefore making Apple appear to be a more popular device, and the excessive data consumption causes people to exceed their data plan limits and therefore paying extra fees for more data. Apple gets a cut from the phone company. That fact is highly documented.

Unless we speak with our wallets, Apple is not going to listen. They have become greedy. They are at war with Android and Samsung. They will do whatever they have to do to win the war, even if it means ******* off a relatively small number of people. The number of people complaining about this problem is not yet high enough to get Apples attention.

And then what do they care? They know most of us are locked into a contract with our phone companies and we are hooked on mobile phones and that were not going to be canceling anything anytime soon.

All I have to say is shame on Apple for allowing this to happen. Steve Jobs, if he were still alive, would never have let this happen. Shame on you Timothy Cook for letting something like this through to a final product that makes your products so frustrating to use now. It is making me as a long time user of Apple products (over 20 years) think twice now about spending my money with Apple now.

I think the idea of consumer bombardment of tech support has a better chance of motivating a fix than saying goodbye to Apple. I suggest everyone following this thread start a support ticket/case with Apple, and keep hounding them. Even better, we should all send a "support email" to the senior tech person helveticum is working with. Even 50 emails might at least raise an eyebrow!

Right on, ERSiclair. I'm not sure though about the idea that Apple's disinterest in fixing our problem is because they benefit financially for every web page hit. Some large percentage of people having this problem, and of people on this thread, are iPad rather than iPhone users, running off our WiFi connection rather than a cellular signal. And many, or most of the apps I have problems with are not internet apps at all but apps whose data is right on the iPad itself.

One thing about us iPad users having this problem, at least those of us with the WiFi-only iPad, is that we're NOT locked into any phone plan. So if there really is a bettter tablet out there without this problem, we COULD switch.

Another difference for us is that in the tablet world Apple is NOT at war with Android and Samsung, or at least not a very active war, beaue Apple pretty much won that war in the tablet world years ago. I haven't been following the Android tablet market so I wouldn't even know what Android tablets to consider if I get so fed up with this problem that I would seriously consider switching. Google Nexus 10? Asus Transformer Infinity?

Anyway, my comments here come from the fact that we iPad users have piggybacked on to this iPhone forum since we're all suffering from the same iOS 7 probl and the solution will come from us joining forces.

I agree with a previous poster that the best way to get this problem fixed is if every one of us starts a help ticket with Apple. My iPad is out of warranty so I couldn't get free support but I followed Helveticum's suggestion and went to

https://expresslane.apple.com/LocaleChange.action and Apple called me back very quickly and opened up a free help ticket. (Now if I they actually follow up ...)

I'm willing. It will probably be most effective if we agree on a common description of the problem.

Any suggestion for a simple description of the problem?

iOS7 multitasking bug causes apps to refresh and/or restart after switching apps from background to foreground and results in background apps not returning to the foreground in exactly the state they were left.

I can imagine a Genius cutting me off halfway through that statement while rolling their eyes and inferring I'm a complete idiot who doesn't understand how real app switching works. I don't think we'll get far unless the problem is boiled down to a simple statement everyone can make and the Geniuses can document.

Maybe just pointing them to this thread would be best.

That's a pretty succinct statement of the problem turfstuf.

I totally agree that we should start bombarding Apple with bug reports.

However, I think that approaching a Genius is too limiting. Either phone an Apple Store as I did and state that you have an iOS bug you wish to report (thus getting put through to a higher level support person) or follow the link that rick7 reposted above.

Either way, supply a link to this thread which in turn references two other threads.

I followed the link & opened a free help ticket. The guy in support had not heard of the issue. He put me in hold so he could talk to an advanced tech. He said there might be a fix in another iOS update. Said they were aware of the issue and activity on the discussions.

He said my best way to get this issue a high priority is to leave feedback on www.apple.com/feedback . He said that goes straight to Cupertino. I left feedback under iPad as a bug report.

Ironically, while trying to leave a link to this thread in the feedback, when I switched tabs to copy the link then returned to the feedback form, guess what?! IT WAS BLANK!! (No joke.)

I used to be a pm in IT sw dev and I dont think it is intended to be that way - it is simply a huge bug. But for the money Apple wants this is just not acceptable!!

Well, I did various things today because I am really serious about dumping all Apple products if that problem persists.

1. Chattet to Apple support, after diagnosing he actually affirmed that I have a problem with my memory

2. Fixed a appointment at the Genius bar - if they cannot fix it there I will insist in a replacement ipad (and if that does not happen, bye-bye Apple...)

3. Used turfstufs description of the bug on the link rick7 posted above

Well, I hope my christmas present will be a working ipad and regaining some faith in Apple...

Thank you for your help with that matter!

@turfstuf - Thanks for opening a ticket and leaving feed back on Apple.com. I followed your lead and gave feedback on Apple.com as well.

How do you open a free help ticket?

I'm doing the online chat thing right now.

Used this link from rick7's post.

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

Then selected the per incident $19.99 option. They don't take credit card info up front. I entered a request and left a callback phone #. They called in about 1 minute. Give them credit-- that was impressive.

This is certainly a bug. I've worked as a software engineer for a lot of years, which is partly why I feel so annoyed with how Apple is handling this. They clearly made a feature change between iOS6 and 7 related to background app toggling (and not just the new background refresh setting). Even the toggling interface itself is literally different than it was before with the bigger preview icons and the up and down swipe to shut down apps so they definitely had something new in mind here. Unfortunately they dropped the ball on getting it right and left a gaping bug.

As a former PM I'm sure you are aware of all of the unit testing, QA testing and performance and load testing (on top of well written code) that it takes to get a solid product developed. That's where I am probably the most at a loss with this one because I simply can't imagine Apple's dev and qa teams being so inefficient that something like this made it out the door. It's ridiculously easy to reproduce which also baffles me because in a solid dev environment, it's generally the oddball workflows that weren't tested for or accounted for properly that make it out the door. Not such obvious bugs as this. The oddball scenarios/bugs are the cases where collecting user logs is critical but for this, they should have zero problem replicating this in a controlled environment so they can come up with a fix. I'm not convinced that submitting more and more info to support isn't going to get us closer to a resolution. It's acknowledgement and prioritization by the higher ups (not support) that will get us somewhere. So far their escalation process doesn't seem efficient either. In the meantime we are stuck in our little sheep chutes because they took the iOS6 fallback option away.

They dont even try to duplicate the problem. - They are having me to a backup / restore before they will go any further. so I'm playing their silly game - They act like they have never heard of the problem.

You know the problem is bad when even the apple fanboys have no defense. I'm not writing, emailing, genius barring, begging or wasting my time trying to get apple to fix what they obviously already know is a problem.

At this point, the next update is the drop dead point for me. If it's not fixed. I'll ebay the devices and never look back. Very unfortunate.

Right, that's what they want me to do also -- the backup and restore. I've been resisting it. Maybe I should go ahead with their game, but I can't help the feeling that I'm being played.