ios7 keeps refreshing apps after switching

This problem is making it much more difficult to use my iPhone 4S. So many wasted rewrites of notes, emails, Evernotes notes, Safari fields etc because I switch out to another app then I have lost everything when I switch back.

I can't understand why this isn't a bigger, more publicly recognised problem? Remember the public exposure to the antenna issue on the iPhone 4? This seems much worse, given that most people use their iPhones more as mini-computers than actual phones.

Neary 400 posts on this thread and plenty more elsewhere. Yet when you look for reviews or reports on iOS7, mostly all you can find are glowing reviews published directly after the launch, filled with praise.

If only a tech blog would pick up on this ACTUAL problem and run with it. You'd get waaay more hits than those me-too iOS7 feature roundups published back in September ;-)

Or how about a fix, Apple?!

restore in dfu mode Day 5: with 18 apps running, 4 apps refreshed including chrome, safari and map. ...

Would agree this needs to be resolved FAST. Using my iPhone4 and ipad (latest gen) has become frustratingly slow. This issue is a large contributor plus the inability to manage the "other" content that tends to consume a lot of storage. I was a late convert to apple at iPhone 4 ... Thought it was awesome because it just worked without fuss (came from windows phone). iPhone was refreshingly simple and straightforward. I dread each IOS release now. Seems Apple May have jumped the shark, lost their waybill... Pick your analogy. ... Will give them a few months more but I'm long overdue for an upgrade and iPhone 5 has nothing new that I value.

Is there anyone here who experienced this problem on the iphone who has since moved to the 5s who could report on how much this problem manifests itself on the 5s? There was a post earlier of someone playing with one at the store, but looking for longer use testing.

I'm eligible for an upgrade but don't want to go with another iphone unless this problem is substantially lessened with the new hardware.

OH GOD PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME GET AN ANDROID. Kind of kidding about that. This problem makes me want to switch platforms, but I also don't want to spend the time to get up to speed on a new phone.

Day 6: everything is OK with 18 apps running. Hmm, Weird.

Update on iOS 7.1 beta 4 - after a while playing with it, I can confirm that our issue is categorically *not* fixed.

I've not rebooted my phone for a week, and it will now not hold more than one app in memory at a time, confirmed by using the ActMonitor app. It even often closes a single app between going back to the home screen and returning to the app.

Apple really need to get their finger out. I am *so* on the verge of jumping ship.

I just fired off my own note to the iMore team, with a link back to this thread and your Google doc. Hopefully one of these hooks will catch so we can get some light on this issue via the press. iOS 7 has completely changed - for the worse - the way I use my iPhone (4S 16 GB) throughout the day. I have zero confidence that when I switch from one app to the other that anything I had in the first app will still be there when I return. I've been resorting to snapping screenshots of my apps (e.g., a subway route or a filled form) before I multitask away from them to ensure I don't lose the info/thought/idea that I was trying to capture.

For me, though, even more annoying and productivity-killing than losing the state of the app, is the 7-12 second delay I experience before the app I switch back to becomes responsive. Whether it's my calendar, Safari, YouTube, Facebook, iBooks, Music, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Flipboard, etc., etc., it's the wait that is the worst. And the wait usually entails the following:

1 - A brief delay as the cached screenshot (which appears to be taken from the last time I exited the app using the double-home-press 'multitask' interface) zoom-loads to fill my screen.

2 - This screenshot then just sits there and mocks me while I try to click, swipe, and otherwise interact with it. After a couple seconds I remember to give up and wait...and wait.

3 - Depending on the app (Facebook does this the most) I will sometimes then see the screen refresh with some newer content. I think this seems to be content that has been loaded/updated via the Background Refresh process while I've been engaged in other apps. At other times, I get out-dated content from what I assume was the suspend data from when iOS sent the app out to pasture to free up memory for other apps. This content stays on screen for a couple seconds. If I'm quick, I can sometimes intercept the app and start doing what I want to.

4 - The app then goes into a state where it starts loading either updated content (a la Facebook) or the content that it should be loading (e.g., the last-opened document in Numbers or Keynote). This takes a couple more seconds.

At this point, I now have full access to the app and can use it as I intend to. However, a typical app-switch takes between 7-12 seconds. Here are some examples of timings I just observed, including what steps (from above) the load/refresh went through:

Facebook from Mail: Steps 1-4. ~5 seconds through step 2. 4 seconds through step 3. 12 seconds until it was fully loaded.

Spotify from Facebook: Steps 1, 2, then 4. 7 seconds until fully loaded.

iBooks from Spotify: iBooks loaded the non-interactive cached screenshot of where I was last reading and displayed it for 4-5 seconds (long enough to lull me into resuming my reading...but wait!). It then took another 5 seconds to load the Library view, where it stayed for a split second, then spent 2 seconds animating the re-opening of the book to the page where I was last reading. Total time to get back to my book: 12 seconds.

App Store from iBooks: Steps 1, 2, and 4. 4-5 seconds until fully loaded.

I could spend more time logging other examples, but I'm fed up from having done this all day in my regular use of this piece of junk. I want my BlackBerry back.

Does anyone have a fix for this yet? I'm hating my phone since I upgraded to ios7, this is incredibly irritating!!

Great post and how irritating it must have been to collect the data. iPhone 4, 64gb here, and almost identical problems. I think I might not take as long as some of your examples, possibly because of more memory? I will use my phone to listen to Pandora, have Saga running constantly in the background, and use the Geocaching app while out walking, and the phone becomes virtually unusable at this point, although the apps don't seem to refresh much as I switch to other apps. Pundits are suggestion the iphone 6 will be out this year, along with iOs8, as well as an iWatch. If it comes to pass, I suspect our problem will remain at least until then. Of course, what these issues make me want to do is upgrade my phone. You don't suppose that is by design?

Lacer,

This is brilliant work.

I have ended up feeling a little hopeless however...

Just looked at other discussions I've been part of. This one has had 22k views and no comment from Apple. Another one I was part of, regarding the power button fault on iphone 4 and 4S had 1.6 MILLION views, and no comment from Apple.

Give up? Accept a mediocre product now? Or continue making as much noise as we can?

I thought it might be interesting to ask some app developers about this problem (for an app called 'Bloom fm', a UK-only streaming/borrowing music service), as I wondered if they had any inside knowledge.

They said that, as we know, once you start running out of RAM, iOS7 starts killing off apps in the background. The problem we're all encountering is that running out of RAM happens so quickly and often, and much more often than it ever did in the far less memory-hungry earlier versions of iOS.

They also, as again we already know, said that by default apps don't restore their state after they've been killed (hence Google Maps losing everything, Safari re-loading etc). BUT there is actually a feature which is available to app developers called "state restoration", which does what it suggests; the app re-opens in the same state as when it was last used, even after being killed by iOS. Apparently it requires a bit of work on the part of the developer...

In summary, iOS7 is so bloated (I haven't managed to get it to take up less than 150MB with nothing else running) that it kills apps all the time as it runs out of memory so often. On a 4S, anyway.

It also seems that developers have a way of working around this, but don't know or can't be bothered.

I know a workaround is a cop-out when the proper solution would be for Apple to release an operating system which isn't so hungry for memory, or so inefficient at managing it. But I thought it was interesting to find that out.

Also interesting to note that some of Apple's own apps don't appear to have this feature built in (although the music player usually does a reasonable job). I use so few of them that I can't comment on the others!

Well this would explain the other extremely annoying behavior of the music player which is that every time I get in my car and play music on shuffle it starts over at the beginning of the exact same song and plays the same sequence no matter how far I've listed into that "shuffled" sequence. I'm just glad its not starting on "I got you babe" for that true groundhog day experience (which would be especially bizarre because I don't have that song).

I just want my phone to work. My hardware works fine so I have no desire to upgrade. Screen cracks and batteries and economically dealt with these days. My battery life is still good after 2-3 years - I go all day on one charge. Admittedly I'm pretty just using it as a phone since it is infuriating to use for anything else.

I will not upgrade to resolve this issue temporarily only to have them release the next round of issues to force another upgrade. I'll just go back to a dumb phone. I'm weary of paying a premium for distractions.

Yes the fact that even the native music app doesn't even remember where you left off during a song is complete garbage.... this NEVER happened pre-iOS 7.

I don't give a rats *** what the technical specifics are, Apple is just supposed to make products that work and this is absolute crap, an absolute step backwards back into the days when Apple was about to go bankrupt.

Apple flopped without Steve Jobs in the past and now they're headed that way again, although it may take them a little longer to die this time.

Unless they put someone in charge over there who really gives a **** and has the same vision Steve did.

DBFreedom, excellent post -- thank you for discussing this with developers. When I took my iPad 2 in a few months ago to my local Genius Bar to discuss the problem, the lead technician told me the same thing the developers told you about -- the "state restoration" feature. He did of course have to echo the party line about iOS7 "working as designed" but did mention that if app developers were to code in this "state restoration" feature then we might take care of the problem. I haven't seen this issue explored much here so it might be worthwhile to learn about it and talk it up more.

However, I've noticed as you have that the stock Apple apps I typically work with -- Safari, Settings, Calendar, Podcast, Photos -- do the same reset thing that we're suffering from and therefore must not use this coding. That Apple decided to not put this crucial code in to their own apps seems to indicate an uncaring attitude, and I don't know where to go with that.

Lacer, thanks also for your work, and for reminding us that it's not just AppResetGate that we're dealing with here but also the much longer wait times for a switched-to app to become available compared to with iOS6. But in terms of the resetting problem proper, I was glad to set you mention Spotify and I just got turned on to it and installed their app. It really does get hit by our problem, constantly losing the track and artist it had previously been playing.

I already went to some Apple Stores, and they just keep on looking me in a strange way after complaining. They seem to be unaware of the huge problem with apps refreshing. I lost so much time already!! And worst, I had to rewrite uncountable texts on emails and webs.

Did somebody be so desperate that downgraded to ios6. And if, how?

Thank you!

pd: Apple, are you reading? Could you please listen to your customers? (28 pages to this thread already!!) Already met a bunch of informatics which are saying goodbye to apple and switching to samsung, with a common adjective to apple devices: rubbish!