ios7 keeps refreshing apps after switching

restored in dfu mode Day 2: everthing is perfect with 15 apps running in the background. The map app and safari were there for 48 by now! I was thinking maybe all the annoying starts because of jailbreak or some certain tweaks installed. Any thoughts?

Firstly, apologies if I'm going over old ground, but I can't see any mention of this in the Google document, so hopefully it's new.

I found something interesting by accident last night. I downloaded one of those battery/system status apps, just because it was free (ActMonitor), and it includes a function which shows which programs are running.

Initially I had nothing much running, and it said that it was running itself, also MobileSMS and MobileMail (it doesn't show system processes).

I opened a few more apps to see if they'd show up, and they did. I got up to about 10 running.

Then I opened a load more, and opened ActMonitor again. 4 programs running. According to the double-clicked home button there were about 20 in the background, but ActMonitor told me there were 4. It also said there was a lot more memory free than there had been when there were 10 running.

It seems to me that, if ActMonitor is to be believed, the number of apps running in the background according to the pretty double-click screen (unless it's very small) bears no resemblance to what's really running, most of them are shut.

I don't know what "wired" memory (currently showing as 300MB), "active" (125MB) and "inactive" (55MB) are (I can guess at what "free" is), but it shows them too. Is "inactive" memory what holds app information in the background?

I figure there are three options:

1) iOS7 is incredibly memory-hungry and doesn't allow space for apps to be stored in the background (is the 300MB, which sometimes drops to about 170MB the size of iOS in memory? Isn't that huge?)

2) the amount of storage needed to keep apps in their running state is a lot higher in iOS7 than previously

3) there's something very inefficient about memory management, and instead of using it to store app data in the background it kills the apps, rather than perhaps killing some unnecessary system stuff like in earlier versions?

A random thought about our issue that just made me chuckle: in October, some time after I'd first noticed our app-refresh problem, I was in France for the first time in my life and was having a great time. At the beginning of the trip we were in Provence in the southeast and had just met a local who invited us over to his house. Before dinner, we were sipping some excellent wine from his collection and talking about music. I noticed an iPad on his coffee table and mentioned that I had one too. I asked him how he liked it. He said, "I liked it a lot until I upgraded it to iOS7. Now I hate it."

Son of a gun: in France, too.

I wonder if there are used iPad 2's for sale that still have iOS6 on them. I honestly wouldn't mind buying one of those and then selling mine, now that so much of the fun has been taken out of the iPad experience by this tragically defective operating system upgrade.

The double-clicked home button app list shows all apps that have ever been run since startup, regardless of if iOS has terminated them. Except it obviously excludes ones that you terminate yourself. Apple zealots will tell you that you don't need to know which apps iOS has terminated.

I'll try the ActMonitor app out - it sounds useful.

Yeah, I realise it shows them regardless of whether iOS has terminated them, but in the earlier versions they'd be left as they were, I thought, not terminated by iOS.

Unless I've misunderstood something!

restored in dfu mode Day 3: with 19 apps running in the background, everthing works perfectly. Map app and safari as well as chrome were there for almost three days without being terminated! Now i have confidnce that restore in dfu mode may resolve my problem. I will test more

restored in dfu mode Day 3: with 19 apps running in the background, everthing works perfectly. Map app and safari as well as chrome were there for almost three days without being terminated! Now i have confidnce that restore in dfu mode may resolve my problem. I will test more

iOS has always terminated apps itself when memory got low. It just seemed to fit a lot more apps in memory in the past!

Interestingly, I've just run ActMonitor, and at one moment Facebook was running, then the next it had gone. Then, soon after, it was back in the list, with it's running time starting from zero again. I wonder if that was Background App Refresh starting it up (I've got it enabled for Facebook for testing purposes).

I switched to Facebook, and it just appeared to start up from scratch though - blank screen for 15 seconds, before displaying a spinner whilst it loaded content.

I wonder if Background App Refresh is intentionally supposed to terminate apps once they have done their updating. If so, that seems a bit pointless.

restored in dfu mode Day 3: with 19 apps running in the background, everthing works perfectly. Map app and safari as well as chrome were there for almost three days without being terminated! Now i have confidnce that restore in dfu mode may resolve my problem. I will test more

Funnily enough I'd noticed the same thing with Facebook, but it doesn't seem to happen with anything else.

I'm surprised how much memory iOS7 uses. At times it's using more memory doing nothing than my 3GS had in total. It seems that maybe the allocation for 'background' apps is just very low, so no wonder iPhone 5s do it better.

Yes, I notice that the Weather app starts itself up every 10 mins or so when Background App Refresh is enabled for it (so much for iOS learning when you use apps!), and if I go to the app before iOS terminates it, the app is almost immediately responsive and the weather is up to date.

One new thing I did notice was that when I switched to the mail app to read one of these updates, iOS terminated every running app apart from MobileSMS and MobileMail. It looks like iOS never terminates these two itself. I wonder if MobileMail (the native mail app) is consuming all the memory?

What I could do with is an app like ActMonitor, but which displays the memory used by each app. Anybody know of one?

Well, it was easy to test whether it was MobileMail hogging all the memory - I just terminated it and gained about 5MB. After terminating everything I can, over 300MB is still in use by the OS - either "wired" or uncategorised (ActMonitor includes uncategorised memory in the "wired" figure).

There's just got to be a memory leak somewhere!

Just tried a second restore - this time with activated DFU mode.

As expected, it didn't help (again)...

This is so annoying and i'm going to sell my iPad and try something new!

Just to add my irritation, had problem for a while with upgraded ipad 2. Now have got ipad minis for the girls and they have only a couple of games on, and are already exhibiting the issue!

Some (small number) apps seem immune though? E.g. Mail - is this because it's constantly talking to mail servers?

Grrrrrr!

At least work is getting me a surface pro!

I just cannot understand how this is not more widely reported. Everyone I know who has iOS7 experiences this problem and that's minimum 20 people.

It's majorly frustrating. When putting together an instagram post for work, I had done all the artwork and most of the copy, popped into Safari to check on a name spelling, immediately back to instagram and guess what? Back to start screen. This happens with every app, without fail. I'm using an ipad 2 and iPhone 4S.

Please, release us from our misery and let us downgrade to ios6. At least it was stable. I've lost count of how many times ios7 has crashed or hung in Safari.