Q: ios7 keeps refreshing apps after switching

You know the problem is bad when even the apple fanboys have no defense.  I'm not writing, emailing, genius barring, begging or wasting my time trying to get apple to fix what they obviously already know is a problem.

At this point, the next update is the drop dead point for me.  If it's not fixed. I'll ebay the devices and never look back. Very unfortunate.

Right, that's what they want me to do also -- the backup and restore.  I've been resisting it.  Maybe I should go ahead with their game, but I can't help the feeling that I'm being played.

Mine just crashed in the middle of the restore. iTunes said it couldnt find my phone. So I tried the phone, doesnt seem like anything has changed so I tried the restore again, and this time I didn't want to backup because I thought I had a good backup. So it tells me if I do a restore, I'll loose all my applications and have to repurchase them. So I did the backup again, and it tells me the same thing.

They are supposed to call me back in an hour and a half. :-(

I have the same feeling rick7. Doing the backup and restore is not much fun (as you saw from my earlier post) but at least it will put the ball back in their court.

I know!  I'm sure you're right and that it's the right thing to do.  I just have the sneaking suspicion that they the reason they're giving me the ball is that they don't want it, don't know what to do with it, don't even know how to play the game, will eagerly pass the ball on to anyone who comes by, and will ultimately try to keep the ball in our court forever...

Agreed. For me this has been the realization of the reasons I hesitated to purchase an Apple device in the first place. I've never been fond of their business model and how tightly you are controlled once your buy in to it. I realize that Apple has essentially pioneered the mobile device world but they aren't going to be able to keep the foot hold forever. Especially not if they keep heading down the same path.

My mini is my first and will be the last Apple device I purchase.

I did the backup and restore, they even gave me a new ipad. It's not that, it's a make you feel like they are doing something empty exercise.

The dudes I was chatting with both seemed to think they could fix it with a restore. I had to hold down the home key for 10 seconds then plug in the cable to get the phone into recovery mode. Message says it has been restored to factory settings.Its rebooting. Now it's doing the out of the box Hello thing in all languages. iTunes just did something, too fast for me to see. Now I'm selecting restore from backup. Prompted me for my password and now it's doing the restore. Its finished the restore and I have apparently lost all installed applications. Attempting the restore again. I lost all of my applications. Photos are there. None of the programs I have bought and paid for are there.

APPLE YOU SUCK!

That was the reset they got me to do too - it didn't work. Bad luck about the restore. I was missing a bunch of apps too; their backup/restore process needs work. At least you can re-download the apps but that can be a lot of time and bandwidth. I think the Apple Store techs are out of their depth on this one.

The reset doesn't work. I completely factory-reset my device, then restored it from backup.  But before I restored it, I ran through a few scenarios involving Safari, Google Maps, and a few other apps.  It was marginally better initially, but I soon got it down to things regularly refreshing every third app swap or so.  I restored my backup and I was right back to where I was before the wipe.

I've found that things get worse the longer it's been between hard resets.  I haven't taken the opportunity to hard reset for a few days and I can rarely switch between two apps without the second app fully refreshing.  Yesterday I pulled up a location in Google Maps and started my route.  I switched over to the Podcasts app to start my podcast. I then switched back to Google Maps and the map refreshed.  Now THAT makes for a useless "smart" phone.

This is not some glitch that can just be cleared with a reset.  It's a case of a new OS needing more memory and not managing memory as well as the previous version.  As I ran through my own memory state logging, it's clear that the 512 MB of RAM on these older devices is nowhere near sufficient for iOS 7. That's why we're not hearing as much from those with the newest 5's and iPad Airs, which have more memory.  But it is still seen with those, just at a higher threshold, so there's still an underlying problem - the extra memory just masks the problem.

I've done some reading through various links provided here and via my own searching.  The Apple article on memory management listed by tonyjambo had a sentence that caught my eye: "Writable data is never removed from memory by the operating system".  If this type of data is not being managed correctly, it may grow to a point where there's no space left for other apps.

iOS 7 has obviously changed the formula for how this memory management works, and these refresh problems are the result of a combination of general poor memory leak management, poor management of this writable data (resulting in the need to shut down other apps), and overall increased memory footprint from all the graphical "fluff" and other bloat in iOS7.

As a product manager for a very large tech company, I agree with the assessment that this issue should never have made it out of the QA cycles.  Bugs, even known bugs, are always going to ship with a release.  But some bugs are more difficult to fix than others.  My guess is that it was probably identified - there was too much testing and there are too many smart resources at Apple for me to believe they didn't find this - but the decision was made to let it out the door anyway.  I think the difficulty of fixing the issue, the delays it would have incurred, the desire to get as many devices on iOS 7 as possible, and perhaps a conclusion that the issue wouldn't affect users to the degree this is, led to the decision to ignore it.  I'm not big into conspiracy theories, but I wouldn't rule out that some may have seen it as a way to "nudge" owners of older devices to new ones.  Regardless, it was the absolutely wrong decision to ship this with the recommendation for older devices with less than 1GB of RAM to upgrade, and I'm sure they'll lose a significant number of users over this.

Unless the Apple engineers can conjur up some magic in how memory is managed in iOS 7, we're all SOL.  But that's the only way I see this getting resolved, as iOS7 isn't going to shrink anytime soon, and Apple isn't going to offer to up free RAM upgrades for those of us stuck with 512 MB.

Good luck to those of you contacting support.  We all appreciate your efforts.  I'm just not holding my breath.  I was contacted proactively by Apple from my posts on the other thread and sent them logs, etc.  But it's been almost a month and I haven't heard a peep from them since.  I think I'll be stuck with this pain until I hit my 2 year contract mark in a few months.  At that point, if this situation isn't at least acknowledged by Apple, I'll cut my losses in platform investment and look at another option.

Restore is a waste of time, I restored and pretended it was a new device, NO RESTORE, and it still does it on both the ipad and the iphone.

Thank God I found this post.  I thought I was taking crazy pills.  *** Apple?!?!  My Ipad2 was the best tool ever and now it is worthless.  I thought I got away from this Microsoft-style crap, but obviously not.  I think my old netbook with Windows XP is better than this doorstop is now.  Fix this or you lose one more customer forever and I am not going to restore anything!!!  Update fix or goodbye!!!

OK, They showed me how to get my programs restored, so as it turns out, I have not identified anything missing. However, it still works the same. So I played their little game. Apple tech support guy seemed to want to blame the web pages I'm accessing for the problems. So for me, I notice the problem with web pages reloading all the time randomly, but for others, it's other applications.

Back in the day, I was an IT guy. We did a lot of formatting and reinstalling because we didn't understand what was causing the problem but we knew it worked once so we got it back to a default configuration.

The Apple dude gave me his direct phone number and so I'm going to call him back when I get time.

The case number is 546168092. If you do call tech support, tell them to look at this case number and see what we have done. Maybe they wont force you to do a backup / restore.

I wonder if I should post it here LOL.

I am glad I found this post. I was wondering what was going on with my devices. This is a huge problem. It happens with nearly every app on my iPad 4 and iPad Mini as well as on my brand new iPhone 5S.

So it is not only hardware (RAM) but also a software bug. This is especially annoying when I am using stuff like Citrix to load my work environment (Lotus and Office) from my company. Switch to another app and you can sign in again...this is a complete joke. I am a long time mac user, this is truly dissapointing. If this is not fixed soon I will have to for something different.

Oh no!

This is really serious.  I've been using my iPad2 for my MA dissertation and constantly switch between PDfExpert, Safari, Pages, and EndNote.  Since I upgraded to IOS7 it's impossible to work with all the delays while the page goes blank then reappears and then I still have to wait before I can type!  The iPad was perfect as a light weight alternative to a laptop now it's just not viable.  I really hope Apple will do something about this.  I was thinking about buying the iPad Air but I need this issue to be resolved.