ios7 keeps refreshing apps after switching

Looks like babsonnexus has beaten me to it!

Thank you for connecting our thread to yours! Has Apple contacted anyone from this thread? We had several people contacted including myself about this issue and we uploaded logs and app snapshots.

Hi Solarc, welcome to our thread! A little further back I posted a reference to yet another one so this problem is pretty widespread. As far as I know no one from this thread has been contacted by Apple though two of us have been to Apple stores to speak to Apple Geniuses. On my visit, the staff filled in a support issue on my behalf.

I noticed one of your guys contacted Apple under the warrantee of a new phone. Can you recommend an effective way of raising our profile with Apple if we are out of warrantee or out of Apple Care? Or do you think that Apple are so aware of this that more complaining will be pointless?

I think the squeaky wheel gets the grease! I would say a call to tech support about the issue is very productive because these calls are always monitored and logged for issues and employee performance. BTW I spoke with one of my customers last night with a iphone 4 ios 7 causes his phone to be slow and crash out. Apple tech told him iphone 4 only met minimums for running ios7. But what do you do when you can't downgrade to 6 cause they quit signing the files? Really resembles a Microsoft move to force upgrade! Anyway let's keep on this together. Join our thread to get updates from ours.

Couldn't resist piling on the Microsoft comment. iOS 7 just seems to be bloated software that works poorly, just like Microsoft.

I had found the other thread after a lot of searching and just got redirected to this one. I have the issue on both my iPhone 4S and Ipad 2. My biggest frustration is Google maps which I use frequently while driving to see traffic. After I get the map view zoomed and positioned to show my route, it gets reset if I get a phone call or switch away for any reason. I know for a fact that this never happened on iOS 6 since I used Google maps every day.

I also put in a support comment on Google maps as I thought that it might be that their app does not correctly support multitasking. Another app that does not support switching well is Evernote, which I find resets frequently when I switch back to it. Some apps don't seem to have the issue which is why I thought it might be an app problem as well as an iOS problem. Of course, the fact that Safari does it is amusing, but that may just be that the left hand never talks to the right hand.

I agree with an earlier comment this has not received any press attention and that it is difficult to come up with the correct search terms to find this thread. Many people I work with don't switch apps a lot and did not notice this until I pointed it out. But it happens on every iPad that I have seen.

This is incredibly frustrating. I wish they wouldn't have pulled the plug on the fallback method though because at this point I completely want to go back to iOS6. Jumping on Apple upgrades is something I certainly won't be doing again in the future.

I read this whole darn thing, so I figured I should jump in since I feel a part of the family now. 🙂

I'm glad I found this thread. I noticed this problem long ago, but couldn't figure out how to explain it, so I put off my search.

Excruciatingly annoying issue.

I guess to comment on here and in reference to our sister thread recently joined, the problem occurs for me in pretty much all apps that have a data entry bar of any kind and regardless of order on the multitask bar (there's some talk in the other thread about testing for the reaction happening more than two apps away from the running app in the multitask area). I will say this: it was happening to me for all apps all the time (10 minute wait or not) regardless of order. That is until I closed a ton of running apps. Now I have four apps running and it's not doing it. I even locked it and woke it back up. It did, however, do it after a wait of more than 10 minutes.

This might corroborate the memory theory (?)

For reference, I'm running 7.0.4 on an iPhone 4S. Crossing my fingers for a fix soon. I do really like iOS 7 outside of that. I just can't go back to Android. Blech.

I'll be watching! Thanks!

I was on the other thread with Solarc, et al, but will join here as well. After having received a call out of the blue from Apple a couple weeks ago in response to my posts on the other thread (where I provided some of my logs, etc.) I haven't heard anything back yet on their efforts to pin this issue down. For the record, I did a factory reset of my device a week or so ago, followed by a restore from backup; but it didn't change any behavior. Hard resets where I completely power down, then reboot seem to help to a degree temporarily, but apps will still refresh, even if only a couple are open.

Some apps are all but useless. I went on a trip recently and the ability to use Google Maps was all but killed with this issue since the map would refresh if it wasn't the only app being used. I had to keep marking my destinations as favorites so I could quickly get back to my route if I ever had to switch to a call, the podcast app, etc. I really hope they've been able to track down the cause of this and that a fix will come in 7.0.5 or in 7.1.

Just curious - do any of you here have corporate policies enabled on your devices (password, lock screen requirements, etc.)? I do and I have another issue related to my call screen controls that seem to be affected by my corporate policy management that I need on my phone. Just wonder if that could be a common thread here, too. Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to go through all the hoops to temporarily disable it to see if it has any kind of effect on this refresh madness.

I can now reproduce this with just two open apps: Safari and iBooks. [iPad 2 on 7.0.4]

1. In Safari create about 8 tabs open at a variety of sites (a typical situation)

2. Open up a book and flick to a page.

3. Swap back to Safari and create a new tab.

4. Flick between the other tabs a few times. This will often cause some of the tabs to refresh (blue progress bar).

5. Swap back to iBooks.

This will usually trigger a refresh in iBooks. Sometimes the book will open back at the right page, sometimes to the wrong page, sometimes to a half-turned page (as best as I can describe it) and sometimes the book will remain closed. Occasionally this will crash Safari ...

This supports the memory theory though who knows what's going on in there. I suspect it's not a simple fix.

Lacer, my iPad has no corporate policies enabled so I think we can rule that out.

Can anyone with an iPhone 5 or iPad Air reproduce this? Does it take more tabs in Safari before the problem occurs?

Comforted (slightly) to know others are equally vexed by this annoying issue. I'm seeing it consistently on my iPad 2, iOS 7.0.4, with 2-6 apps open. The constant seems to be Safari. When switching back to Safari, it refreshes the open tab, losing all data. Switching to another tab also triggers a refresh. Switching back to other open apps produces a variety of behaviors. Some reopen (Scrabble & Words With Friends, for example), some refresh, some behave as expected (remain as left, e.g. Tweetbot). Copying and pasting between apps can be really maddening.

This is also reproducible on my iPhone 4S. Hope there is a resolution soon, as it's making my iPad virtually unusable for work.

Just throwing in my two pennies. iPad 2, latest iOs.... And what everyone else has said. Painful to have to relog into sites when I switch to another app, even briefly, then back to Safari.

Just curious if anyone's found the same behavior in other web browsers? When I'm reviewing a flight plan, etc., prior to taking wheels to the airport, I'm under a time crunch, and constantly relogging in really doesn't help.

Yes, I use Dolphin Browser to the same results. Actually, I cannot keep more than one tab in memory. If I move over a tab, the first tab refreshes when I go back to it, even a moment later.

I'm not sure if it is related, but I've also been having a deluge of app crashes. Dolphin is one that is crashing regularly, but its been happening a lot with Apple Apps. just today I had Weather crash on me. Mail is not only crashing, but often times the order of my mailboxes gets reset. IE, I have four accounts and I set them in order of D, B, C, A. But after Mail crashes or refreshes in the background, they come back at A, B, C, D and then start to download messages again.

These problems just keep piling up and I don't believe.

I was having this problem for the LONGEST time, but I just turned my phone off (which I NEVER do) and the problem is now gone 🙂

It's worth a try, for anyone still experiencing this

I went back a second time to the Genius Bar at my local Apple store for a follow-up about our problem. The previous week I'd talked with someone from the Genius Bar about it and he'd suggested that it might be caused by my not having enough free space on my iPad. I'd gone home and freed up more space and that had no effect, so I decided to go in for a follow-up. This time they assigned me the lead technician. He spent quite some time with me and I'm going to write up my memory of what he said.

He said it's "working as designed" (how many times have we all heard that?) which was pretty distressing to hear. He says the problem did not crop up with iOS 7 and he's seen it before, though he admit that it's aggravated by the increased memory demands of iOS 7. However, he did suggest a different way of looking at the issue which I hadn't considered before, and I'll describe that. But after checking out his suggestions (see below) I don't think his analysis was correct.

He said that it's related to the Background App Refresh (BAR) setting in Settings. I told him that when I first started noticing the problem two months ago I investigated this possibility but then ruled it out. I reasoned that I don't want an app to refresh itself while it's in the background. If it did refresh itself, then when I'd switch back to it and it was brought back to the foreground, that refresh might actually CAUSE the problem we're seeing. So since then I've had BAR turned off completely.

In response, however, he described our problem and its relationship to Background App Refresh in a way that surprised me. He said that you DO want to turn on Background App Refresh for the apps that you'll be switching back to, because in multi-tasking (or, rather, the pseudo-multitasking that we have on our Apple mobile devices) one of the things that BAR does is to "protect" the original state of the app. This is the first time I'd heard the idea of Background App Refresh protecting and saving the original state of the app. So if you have BAR turned on for that app, then when you switch back to the app it will get restored to how it was at the time when you switched away from it -- which is what we want and what we remember fondly from iOS 6.

However, his explanation didn't seem right. I said that if that was the case, then app "refresh" was certainly a bad term for this. He agreed that it was a bad term. But he responded that a good way to think about it was that turning on BAR for an app "refreshes" THE APP'S ORIGINAL STATE. It puts up a shield around the app's memory space when it's loaded, so it says to the OS: "don't mess with me, I'm holding on to what I had before, the original state. You can't borrow any memory from me even if you need it."

He said that the problem we're noticing will NOT exist for apps that have had BAR turned on in Settings. This surprised me but he insisted that for any app that restarts/refreshes itself when you switch back to it, if it's not in the app list in BAR then the developers need to put in special code to deal with BAR. Once the app would be upgraded in that way, if you would turn on BAR for that app it would then not exhibit the behavior we've been seeing.

I was surprised to hear all this and mentioned that almost all the apps I use have already been upgraded for iOS 7. He said that was true but that many of those allegedly upgraded apps have still not incorporated code for BAR. Once they did, and would issue a new release, then the app wouldn't display the behavior we're seeing.

I wanted to believe him but was skeptical, especially given that three of the apps that get refreshed unnecessarily when switching back to them -- Safari, Photos and Settings -- are all stock Apple apps. Why didn't they have BAR code built in to them? He wasn't sure.

I thanked him and went home. I turned on my iPad and went into Settings and turned on the option for Background App Refresh, as I'd previously had it off. Then to test his theory I turned it on specifically for a few of the apps that I use at least occasionally and that do have an entry in BAR: NY Times, Organic Gardening, New Yorker and the stock Podcasts app.

For the next hour or so I tested each of these. I opened up a specific item in the app such as an article or a podcast, then switched away from it. I then worked elsewhere for ten minutes or so, then switched back to the app. For the NY Times, the reset closed the article completely and returned to the main page -- just as I'd feared. For Organic Gardening, switching back to the app did the same thing: closed the article and returned to the main page. For the New Yorker, switching back caused the app to go blank momentarily, then it returned to the article but to the beginning of the article and I lost my place. For the Podcasts app, switching back caused a reset which closed the podcast I was looking at and it went back to the main page.

So the problem is exactly the same even for apps that have Background App Refresh turned on. I therefore have to conclude that the analysis given to me by the technician was incorrect. I believe that his suggestion that the problem will be solved when individual app developers upgrade their app to deal with Background App Refresh was not accurate.

Thanks for the detailed report rick7. The tech's theory was intriguing, if ultimately flawed. I think we've exhausted the potential of the Genius Bar - my visit was no help either - so I suppose we just have to rely on the Apple dev team to ort it out.

It is so frustrating to hear claims that it 'works as designed' - the standard cop-out and it would be so refreshing to find just one Apple employee who is as annoyed with this as we are.

I'm still unsure how prevalent this is with new devices (iPhone 5, iPad Air). It has been reported on these devices but is it as bad?

I'd consider moving to another platform but the combination of iPad and App Store is still pretty unbeatable IMO.