Q: ios7 keeps refreshing apps after switching

With iOS 7.04 and IPhone 4S

Close all app

Open Facebook app

Scroll down a little the timeline

Open game Jelly Splash

Enter a leek game

Go back to Facebook

Scroll down a little the timeline

Go back to Jelly Splash

The game will restart and put you to level select

If you have an IPhone with a lot of memory, in the middle open before

also Wordon or other 1 or 2 game

At the moment, I've got the current situation in iOS 7.1 beta 4:

ebay - go to Reminders page

Amazon - go to Search page, do a search

Twitter - scroll down the page a bit

Facebook - view comments on an entry

Swiching between these apps, in order, I get the following:

ebay - restarts to home page

Amazon - restarts, shows home page, then changes to search page, with search term entered but search not performed

Twitter - restarts to top of page

Facebook - restarts to top of page

Very occasionally, one of the apps will have stayed open, but this appears to be random.

It looks like you can't have more than two or three (reasonably functional) apps in memory on 512MB devices at a time.

One thing I notice, is that if I navigate to the apps using the app icons, for the apps that restart I get shown the startup images. If I navigate using the task switcher, I get shown a frozen image of the previous state for 5 or so seconds (except for Facebook, which looks like it saves a blank screen as it's "previous state" image), before being briefly shown the startup image. With the former, you can see that the app was closed and is restarting. With the latter, it just makes the operating system seem broken.

My current thoughts are:

1. Apple should never have provided the Background App Refresh feature for 512MB devices.

2. The "previous state" images should not be displayed for apps that need to restart, when selected through the app switcher.

3. The "app refresh" issue is probably just a result of iOS's memory management strategy, that is exacerbated in iOS 7 due to its increased RAM usage.

4. It's still a pretty poor situation when I have just 68MB of RAM used by apps, but 332MB (65% of my total!) is mysteriously unaccounted for (its use is undocumented by Apple). However, it appears that this is not new to iOS 7.

Safari losing form data (by reloading the page after switching to another app, then switching back) may be a separate issue, so from now I'm going to concentrate on testing to see if that still happens in 7.1 beta 4.

Helveticum - thanks for all of your work on the document. I'll leave it up to you and others to decide whether things are worse in 7.0 than how I describe 7.1 beta 4. I still think there's something worth pursuing in trying to get Apple to do something to free up unaccounted-for memory, even if this has always existed and has only just now come to a head.

Further to my previous post, one more thought I had was the issue of navigation apps restarting.

I also remember reading somewhere about Background App Refresh supposedly "protecting" enabled apps from being terminated, which obviously didn't happen in 7.0.

I added Google Maps (with a route planned) to my list of cycled apps. With Background App Refresh turned off for Google Maps, the app (and route) is pretty easily lost. However, I can report that in 7.1 beta 4, with the app enabled for Background App Refresh, try as I might, I could not get it to be terminated and the route lost. We might well have evidence of a fix!!

One more update - it's not the Background App Refresh setting alone that keeps the Google Maps app alive: I tried enabling it for other apps, and they still got terminated. Presumably it's something like Background App Refresh in conjunction with active use of Location Services.

This is a shame because it still renders the concept of Background App Refresh redundant and useless on 512MB devices.

Thanks paulfromstone for your detailed feedback on 7.1 Beta 4. I'm trying to sum up your and JustinSindelar1 findings, oversimplifying if necessary, so that I can update the document (yes, the one that was in its final version ...):

In brief, it seems that 7.1 does not seem to improve the app refresh problem for 512MB devices though, from JustinSindelar1's test, things have improved on 1GB machines. The evidence suggests we still have an iOS memory management problem.

BTW, I too have noticed the frozen images of 'background' apps when swapping between them. I may be wrong but I think this image is sometimes of an earlier app state than I am expecting to return to. Also, the frozen images sometimes sit slightly off centre, as if not quite having scrolled across. As you say it does have a rather broken look about it. Slick it isn't.

Given what you have found, I am inclined to make a small update to the Google Doc and send its on its way.

Helveticum, I notice that same thing of the frozen images of background apps sometimes visually sitting slightly off center as you're switching apps.  After a second or two, they center themselves. 

Very bizarre and yes, it does give the impression of a not-quite-polished operating system.

Rick7, your description of 'a not-quite-polished operating system' shows considerable restraint on your part.

:-)))) Indeed.

I just thought I'd let everyone know that I took a trip to the Apple store yesterday and could not replicate the problem on a demo iPhone 5s.

I had GarageBand, iBooks, Safari with at least 3 tabs, and several other apps open, and none of them refreshed even after 5-10 minutes.

I however have not, and will not be upgrading because I have over $1,000 in iPhone accessories that use the 30 pin connector... the lightning cable changeover is a ******* nightmare.

Hi all.

Very glad I found this thread, as I recently went from a 3GS on iOS 5.something to a 4S on iOS 7, and have found exactly this problem.

Sorry if I've missed this being mentioned already (there are 24 pages..!) but one thing strikes me as odd about the theory of it being to do with low memory on 'older' devices.

My 3GS could have loads of apps in the background, and none of them lost their place/song/page/whatever, as long as I didn't jiggle-close them. I also had a few which would start playing the song I'd been listening to weeks before even though I'd jiggle-closed them at the time.

Why would a 3GS with whatever memory it had (256MB?) be able to store all this information, and a 4S not be able to? Both devices were/are 16GB, and both were/are constantly running with under 1GB free.

Again, sorry if this has already come up and been dealt with. I just don't understand it, and I'm irritated by it on a daily basis.

Welcome to the thread, dbfreedom. I think the general feeling is that iOS 7 has memory management issues not present in earlier versions of iOS 7 (or if present they were less intrusive). So

Old device + old iOS = Great

Old device + iOS 7.0 = Poor

Old device + iOS 7.1 = Probably still poor

New device + iOS 7.1 = Probably good

On the last two cases, the jury is still out on just what 7.1 fixes on what device though you can read a few opinions on the previous few pages (24 pages is pretty daunting).

Hi guys,

first of all, thanks to all for your detailed posts. This refresh behaviour on my iPad 2 (iOS 7.0.4) drives me crazy and i thought i'm the only one with this problem.

For me it's definitely a problem with the memory management of iOS 7. And not only with closing background apps but also with a higher memory usage. I just found a threat on Stackoverflow discussing crashes of apps using Google Maps API: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18759401/google-map-crashes-in-ios7

I really hope that there will be a fix soon.

Sorry dbfreedom, in my earlier post I meant to write:

"I think the general feeling is that iOS 7 has memory management issues not present in earlier versions of iOS (or if present they were less intrusive)."

(I.e. the earlier versions being iOS 6 and iOS 5 and iOS 4. Sorry for any confusion)

I'm on my third ipad and I've been having this problem using Chrome and Safari, both.  Chrome was super when I installed it a few months ago, but has become most frustrating.  Safari is only slightly better.  It's definitely getting worse over time.  I have a brand new ipad mini with up to date ios 7.0.4

What I do know, is I wouldn't have wanted to buy another new ipad if the performance of last one was this poor! This will force us to look elsewhere for products and hurt sales.