ios7 keeps refreshing apps after switching

Very disappointing phone call from Apple tonight. The rep was very responsible, as he did everything he said he would from day one by contacting me on a regular basis as he recieved information. However, he informed me tonight that senior software engineers say this is an expected reaction by IOS 7. That I could try to reduce the number of tabs in safari i have open and programs I have open to help reduce this issue. ( so have less multi-tasking items open so multi-tasking will work better! Not really what I wanted to hear about my devices 5 total IOS devices!) He did say we can go to www.apple.com/feedback and give them a peice of our minds and that this is looked at daily by apple folks. So lets give it a go, because I am really ready to go back to android until these heros can figure this out!

I have wrote now at feedback :

After month with iOS 7 multitasking bug where I I can't use anymore my iPhone with more than one app opened because when I switch back to previous app and I lost position, filled form, login, or urgent game or current email replay.

I have hope that you will fix the problem with a firmware update but we are at fix 7.04 and the problem remain. You said that I. Is an aspected function of iOS 7.

My iPhone with ios6 was fantastic now with ios7 is unusable.

After 5 years you have lost a costumer ! I and my factory switch

to Android phone to have a smartphone that is a computer replacement.

I miss Steve Jobs this will never happened with him

Bye bye apple.

@ERSinclair: it really is frustrating that the problem can sometimes be hard to reproduce. Your unwanted purchases show a dedication beyond the call of duty. I suggest netting the drone and selling it on eBay to defray expenses.

@Solarc: what a disappointing attitude from Apple. While I do not believe for one minute that this is 'working as designed', the engineers are clearly being told what to say. I still live in hope that it will be fixed one day with little or no fanfare or acknowledgment.

@Miellino: thanks for logging the feedback - this has prompted me to add my own:

<feedback>

Subject: Loss of state on return to suspended apps in iOS7

Your engineers are by now well aware of the growing tide of disappointment and frustration with iOS 7’s inability to adequately maintain apps' states when they get suspended. This leads to loss of data in partially filled forms in Safari, books closing in iBooks, Event data being lost in Calendar, films closing in Videos, etc.

The common link in all of these problems would appear to be Safari. With any more than 6 tabs active, swapping between the tabs causes iOS to lose the state of many of its suspended apps. See here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5380124?start=300&tstart=0

Some have been given feedback from Apple that this works as designed but multitasking worked fine in iOS 6. It is the power users that are being affected and Apple is rapidly losing loyal customers.

</feedback>

@All: any more feedback on the Safari Shuffle? Can we reliably reproduce the problem? Do we need to add extra background apps to the process? Please include your iDevice details and iOS level.

Do we continue with the article as written, and add a sentence that adds a caveat about the randomness of the problem? I am still aware that we may be diluting the impact. However, even if the problem is not reproducible every time, I am sure that most users reading about it for the first time will recognise the issue. And if they don't, they are probably are not heavy users and don't care anyway.

And let's all add some feedback today at www.apple.com/feedback as Solarc, Miellino and others have done. It took me 5 minutes.

Solarc - what a disappointing response from Apple. This makes me even more determined to get the word out!

Regarding the advice to "reduce the number of open apps", this from a company who (used to) have the motto "it just works"! There are several threads on the Apple discussion boards where people have been shot down for asking for a quick way to close all open apps - being told that it's not necessary to, as iOS looks after memory management for you. Well, now Apple officially assert that it no longer does.

Also, Apple have conveniently made it impossible to know what apps are open or not, by not making any distinction in the app switcher.

I'm currently installing iOS 7.1 beta 4. I don't expect any improvement, but will report back.

Regarding the "Safari Shuffle" technique, I also had no joy. I did however manage to lose a new calendar entry by opening all of the built-in apps that I could find (i.e. no third party apps), but failed to repeat it on a second attempt.

Just to confirm: the issue has not been fixed in iOS 7.1 beta 4.

Disappointing, paulfromstone, but it seems to confirm what I have read elsewhere, i.e. no fix in 7.1.

You have mentioned that you too are keen to get the word out but as you have found out, reproducing the problem can be a challenge. The Safari Shuffle seems to do it for many of us though not for you.

What iPhone/iPad have you got? Does it help to increase the number of tabs? (Ensure they are on busy pages)

Do you feel we should press on with the article I have outlined on the basis that any power user will instantly recognise the issue? Those not aware of the problem may not even care about trying to reproduce it.

Perhaps I should simply refer to the fact that a combination of multiple apps and the Safari Shuffle can lead to the problem rather than try and give a guaranteed procedure for recreating it.

Thoughts?

For me it is not hard to reproduce at all. It happens to me all the time with just two tabs open in Safari and it happens to just about every app I open up. And it will happen right after I reboot the iPad and it doesn't matter how many apps I have open. I can close all but a couple and I still lose the state of the apps and have them refresh.

I've got an iPhone 4. I think the key to reproducing the issue is to have enough apps running (for long enough) to have used up pretty much all available RAM (equivalent to your "Safari Baseline") before starting on the "new event loss" sequence. Once this is done, the effect happens a lot more regularly, presumably because iOS terminates an app or two just to free up enough RAM to keep going.

Part of the hindrance of finding out a definitive sequence is that the way iOS chooses what to terminate is not public information. However, I think we are discovering that it's a bit random, because repeating a sequence that caused the issue once doesn't necessarily cause it to happen again.

I'm running iOS 7.1 Beta 4, and don't seem to have this issue. I've tried to replicate the problem a few times, and can't find it. Hopefully this means it will be fixed when 7.1 is publicly released soon! Good luck!

This is problem is so frustrating. JustinSindlar1, your experience is the opposite of paulfromstone.

It might be useful if we could tell at a glance what each other's main device is plus the iOS level. This might allow us to spot patterns in the way the problem can be encouraged to manifest itself. Apple doesn't appear to allow signature text or a signature graphic but I put some info in the Location field of my Profile. You can now see this alongside my Username.

I'm sorry, I don't really understand what you're asking. If this helps, I'm running iOS 7.1 Beta 4 on my iPhone 5s. Part of the problem is that the iPhone 4 only has 256 mb of RAM if I recall correctly. That may be why your apps and such have to refresh so often.

I do agree, low amounts of RAM will definitely cause this. But even on my iPhone 5s running 7.0.4, this issue would happen with only a few apps running. I think this issue was patched in iOS 7.1, which should be publicly released soon.

I should have been more explicit. Look at the top of the forum page. You will see a 'Your Stuff' pull-down. Go to

Your Stuff -> Profile -> Edit Profile &amp; Privacy

I then entered '(iPad 2 wifi 64GB, iOS 7.0.4)' in the Location field (one could optionally put one's country name there). This allows others to see my configuration at a glance. I guess for you it would be '(iPhone 5S, iOS 7.0.4)’.

We can then see who has the 1GB RAM machines (the iPad Air, iPhone 5) and who only has 512MB RAM. It is likely that the newer machines see this problem less often, but I'm not sure that is a hard-and-fast rule.

I have already seen several reports, including paulfromstone on this thread, that iOS 7.1 does not generally solve our problem. However, I gather that Safari itself has had some fixes so that when swapping between tabs or returning to Safari from another app, the tab states are maintained (I.e. no loss of form data). This remains to be seen.

Paulfromstone, is Safari better (in isolation it mean)? Does it maintain its state? Is it just all the other apps that still suffer?

Safari does seem to be better in isolation so far on 7.1 beta 4.

Maybe I also spoke too soon about the wider app refresh problem still being there - today on an iPhone 4 running iOS 6, I tried starting to create a diary entry, then opened every built-in app, including 8 Safari windows. When I went back to the calendar, it restarted and my new entry had been lost.

I'm starting to wonder if the issue's always been there, but it was just brought to light (for me) with the new Background App Refresh feature being effectively useless, at least on 512MB devices. Apps definitely use more memory on iOS 7 though, which at least increases the likelihood of the issue occurring.

At various points in this thread I have picked up on suggestions that the refresh problem has always been there but it went over a threshold in iOS 7 that made it unacceptable to heavy users.

There is the likelihood then of us being told 'it has always worked this way' where, technically, Apple could be correct. I certainly was not aware of any issue before iOS 7 however, so the scale of the issue has certainly tipped towards 'Unacceptable'.

So where do we stand?

We have a problem that is, for some, hard to recreate and a problem that, perhaps, has been an unnoticed feature of iOS 6 (and iOS 5?) for some time.

What is indisputable however, is that iOS 7 has magnified the effect of this refresh issue to extent that many of us are finding our iPads and iPhones far less usable. If that is serious for us, surely it follows that it could become serious for many others and hence serious for Apple, particularly if awareness of the issue can be heightened.

I was starting to feel despondent over the last few days as reproducibility became ever challenging. Was it even worth trying to fight this thing?

Anyway, I propose to modify my document somewhat playing down the instructions to reproduce the problem. My argument, made in an earlier post, is that those not aware of the problem will probably not care about it enough to try and cause it. We will be trying to appeal to those who have seen some strange things going on but haven't quite figured out what it is yet.

I will post the - hopefully final - version within the next few days.