Q: ios7 keeps refreshing apps after switching

Life may be too short to struggle fruitlessly, but certainly not to struggle towards solutions. Perhaps my tone above was frustrated and complaint-ridden, but that arises from a time, iOS6 to be precise, when iOS did not behave this way and had allowed many of us to develop a useful workflow without having to worry about random page refreshes and app reboots when switching apps.

I stay with these products because, as you say, the needs and demands of the workplace and social life as well are complex. My Apple devices work fairly well integrating much of the data that I use daily, they are reliable, and they are well-made. It is really scholarly work that I find difficult now on the iOS that was not so much so in the past. And what is specifically difficult there is web-based research and Internet forum interactions, for me anyway.

I hope your thinly veiled "love it or leave it" stance is also merely one of frustration with the friction on this issue. There are 65 pages of griping on this issue here, and there is a reason for that. The griping is a labor of love at its core, because, as you imply, it'd be easy to walk out the door.

It's not thinly veiled anything. It was a very overt pragmatic suggestion. It's what I would do If I felt the way you sounded as if you felt.  No one here can effect the changes you want. Submit your feedback to Apple. work with Apple support, vote with your wallet. Commiserating here is just that and announcing/threatening that you're going to or have gone to another platform also serves no technical support purpose.

Best of luck.

I stumbled on this thread because I'm getting frustrated with my iPad mini 1 (incidentally freshly restored to iOS 8.1.2 with 6.5GB of storage available).  My (simple) workflow starts with iBooks and now and again use Safari to do a tiny bit of research related to the book I'm reading.

Switching back to iBooks takes 22 seconds to be able to continue reading, almost every single time.  That's borderline unuseable (and Apple still sell mini 1's).  The same workflow takes "only" 7 seconds on my iPhone 6+ and admittedly, full iBook refreshes are less frequent but still occur.

I suppose the degradation experienced relates to iOS7+ being more memory hungry, leaving less memory for apps, which also explains why the problem occurs less on devices with more memory but there are a few things Apple could do to improve this sorry state of affairs:

1) Ensure stock apps snap back quickly in such situations (I'm thinking about those useless iBooks animations).

2) Expose apps that are too greedy with memory - similarly to what was done with the battery usage monitor in iOS8.

Someone said earlier in the thread that since this started occurring on his iPad, he's going back to his laptop.  Apple have experienced deteriorating iPad sales of late...

It may well be a memory problem, but I'm not at all sure that I see it any less on my 128 Gig  iPhone 6 Plus than on my first generation iPad 2. It is definitely a problem in the fiber of iOS7 and iOS8. This simply never happened before that. The likelihood that this is not fixable without an OS re-design means not only that it won't be fixed, but also that it won't be acknowledged publicly as a problem by the company, and who can blame them?

It is funny, though, re your suggestion #1, the one app that seems to behave well is Mail. It seldom does a total refresh, and if you double click the home button into the app switcher from another app, instead of seeing an ancient screenshot thumbnail of Mail, you actually see an up-to-date screenshot including any mail you may have just received. Somehow, that app plays nicely, but how?

I may not have been the guy who said he went back to his laptop, but that is what I did quite awhile ago, though I had hoped iOS8 would change that - it did not. My iDevices are great for making appointments on my sync'd calendar, for checking minor emails (without extensive docs attached), sending texts, playing games, etc. This IS an improvement to my workflow, but without my laptop, I am dead in the water. I take it anywhere I go overnight.

I'm sure I could find extensive workarounds in the quest to untether, but it's not worth it.

I think iPad sales are probably down because they last and are well-made, without enormous incentive to upgrade, rather than because of workflow issues, though it would be nice if the market spoke for us. Also, I am open to the possibility that I am clinging to old-fashioned work habits, though I have yet to see anyone employ a better way to get done what has to be.

As to your suggestion #2, I have stopped keeping multiple apps open at all for the most part, and that helps a little, especially on the old iPad, but surprisingly little, perhaps because of the memory overhead of iOS8 itself in that old machine.

At the risk of rambling (oops, too late), maybe it comes down to waiting to see whether tolerating severe limitations is worth it to eventually arrive at the waypoint Apple has set for itself down the road, or whether some of their forecasting is misguided and other companies will pull ahead in functionality. Apple has been pretty good this way over time, eventually delivering power users many of the features they had clamored for for years, while other less forward-thinking companies have foundered as times have changed. I guess we'll see.

P.S. I think 6.5GB is minimal "disk" space. I'll bet your iBooks would refresh faster if you could free up 10 or 15GB - this worked for my iPad.

STill got this 'feature' or something on iPhone 6+, running on iOS 8.

Im glad this issue is being discussed.

Particularly frustrating if using the calc feature on safari and switch to see numbers in another app and return to find the calc gone. Or the original app refreshing so you lose your page/point. Also switching from ibooks/ kindle and losing your page,just grr...

Yes its a minor annoyance, but when face with it every few minutes of the time you use the ipad/iphone it can become very frustrating. Its been months now. Still no news on a fix?

iOS 8.1.3  seems to make Multitasking more reliable.

Since the update apps seems to hold their Multitasking content better then before.

I had since the update only 2-3 App refreshes.

Before i had every day multiple refreshes.

Can anyone confirm this? I'm using an iPhone 6.

I've not seen any improvement on the one device I was willing to risk updating (an iPad Air v1).  Virtually every app refreshes and takes me back to its "home" when I try to multitask.

It looks like a few of the latest comments were deleted or something. Anyhow, an Apple customer service person directed me towards the apple.com/feedback page and recommended I direct everyone from this threrad there as well. Maybe if enough people complain about this extremely annoying issue, they may actually try to fix it.

I've been dealing with this issue and trying to troubleshoot it on my own for awhile now, but didn't come across this thread until last night after finding the right string of words to search. I suspect that many others haven't been able to find this themselves, or like most things nowadays, think the problem probably already has had enough people talking about it that it's bound to get fixed in an update. I guess that's what I thought for awhile too, but after waiting and waiting and still seeing it persist, I decided that I needed to take action again. Anyhow, I'm off to send them feedback now.

Also, at the top of this thread it says that this discussion was "branched to a new discussion" but when I try to go to the link it provides, it says I'm Unauthorized and "Access to this place or content is restricted. If you think this is a mistake, please contact your administrator or the person who directed you here."

I'm not sure how that link works, but all threads have it, and all of them go to the same error. This thread did not actually branch to another discussion. So there was nothing to see. Just FYI.

GB

ModusOp138 wrote:

 

Also, at the top of this thread it says that this discussion was "branched to a new discussion" but when I try to go to the link it provides, it says I'm Unauthorized and "Access to this place or content is restricted. If you think this is a mistake, please contact your administrator or the person who directed you here."

When the Hosts remove a post for violations of the Terms of Use, they first move the post to a separate thread. On a couple of rare occasions, I've actually seen the thread. They don't stay around long, though. So, when you click on that link, it's leading to threads that are either gone or locked from view. I don't know enough about how the forums software works to say which.

OK. Thanks. Problem still intermittently occurring for me, btw. Anyone else?

gail from maine wrote:

 

I'm not sure how that link works, but all threads have it, and all of them go to the same error. This thread did not actually branch to another discussion. So there was nothing to see. Just FYI.

Actually, the posts are moved to another forum that only the hosts can access.

Posts are not actually deleted. (likely for legal reasons)

ModusOp138 wrote:

OK. Thanks. Problem still intermittently occurring for me, btw.

It's not a problem,. It is working as it is supposed to.