ios7 keeps refreshing apps after switching

I can't offer a solution but I can at least add that I am having the same problems. With Safari as the OP described but also other apps such as iBooks. When coming back to iBooks from another app, iBooks emerges from the background only to close the book I was in, then open it again. It really is infuriating. I'm at least glad to see it's not just me and hope it's addressed in 7.0.3.

Having the same problem here, and it's clearly not just Safari but possibly all apps. And I'm not sure it happens all the time but only sometimes. Glad to see this problem discussed here, as I haven't been seeing it discussed elsewhere.

I haven't noticed this problem since the 7.0.3 upgrade. As an aside I have also enabled the 'Reduce Motion' setting as I find the animation excessive and gratuitous. I disabled it again to see if that was part of the solution to the original problem but it makes no difference. So it looks as if it's solved in 7.0.3 (I have an iPad 2 64gb wifi only).

Hmmm... I'm running iOS 7.0.3 on my iPad 2 and I defiinitely have the problem. (I actually just now noticed that this is the iPhone forum and not the iPad forum!) Anyone else?

I'm trying to recall what else I tried. I think I carried out a "Reset All Settings" while still in 7.0.2. I didn't notice any improvement at the time but (clutching at straws here), perhaps this followed by the upgrade to 7.0.3 did the trick. Check the impact of this command if you've not used it before, but it wasn't too much of a hassle to get back to where I was before. [And apologies if we have hijacked an iPhone thread]

Settings>General>Background App Refresh. You can adjust settings there.

The "Background App Refresh" setting doesn't seem to be relevant to this issue. It's the first thing I tried when I noticed the problem, and turning the setting off completely has no effect. It's weird: it's not a "background refresh" that's happening, but rather a refresh that happens only when you switch back to an app after having been away from it. I don't even know what to call it: a 'switch-back refresh'?

I may be wrong, but I don't think this will have any effect. I gathered that this will allow apps to get data updates in the background. The problem some of us have had is that when returning to an app that has been put into the background, the app will close then re-open which is slow and clumsy and can lose you your place in the app.

I think rick7 and I posted pretty much the same thing at the same time, I.e. I am agreeing with rick7 here.

It's almost the opposite of background refresh -- you could even call the problem "re-foregrounded app refresh" :-)

Spot on.

I have the same problem and use the ipad as the main electronic device on a one-year trip. It is costing me huge amounts of time and causes a lot of trouble!!! Has there been a solution offered so far???

I'm getting this issue in all apps on my iPhone 4 on iOS 7.0.3. It's almost like there's no multitasking any more - pre iOS 4. All apps restart when resuming them after more than about 10 minutes of being suspended.

The iOS App Programming Guide says, "When a low-memory condition occurs, the system may purge suspended apps without notice to make more space for the foreground app."

My suspicion is that it is this happening - the phone's constantly running in a low-memory condition and so all suspended apps are being killed.

I've turned on "Reduce Motion" and "Increase Contrast" in the hope that these reduce memory usage, but it doesn't appear to have helped (although the phone feels a bit faster now).

paulfromstone's explanation sounds about right. What is causing our devices to be running constantly in a low-memory environment?

The thing that I'm confused about is: are there people running either an iPad or iPhone on iOS 7.x for whom this is NOT happening? There must be millions, or else this thread would be flooded and it's not, and all the tech writers would have been all over it since the day iOS 7 first was released, and they're not. What are they doing that we're not? If this were happening to everybody, it would have already been a major iOS 7 scandal.

Maybe helveticum has the secret -- some weird, unknownundocumented flag that no one knows about except a few Apple programmers got triggered for us at some point and that caused the problem, and we have to do a 'Reset All Settings' to undo it. The thing is, I've done so much customization -- most of which I can't remember -- that I'm kind of afraid to try it. But maybe I have to. But then again if it doesn't work...

Has anyone else taken this step?

What device are you using? The iPhone 5/5s and iPad 3 have 1GB, while the iPhone 4/4S and iPad 2 have 512MB, so that could have something to do with others not having the same issue.