iOS 9 Default Startup Apps?

GreggMack54 wrote:

Stedman1, thank you for your quick response. I just tried an experiment to test your suggestion.

I fist double-tapped the Home Button and flicked off the Settings, Reminders, Mail, Facebook, and Twitter screens. I then opened up 5 completely different apps. Double-tapping the Home Button shows those 5 apps screens - and I flicked them all off. I then restarted my iPhone as described above. After it restarted, double-tapping the Home Button once again shows these 5 apps screens: Settings, Reminders, Mail, Facebook, and Twitter.... I would like for it to behave like all previous iOS versions - and not have ANY other Apps screens visible when I double-tap the Home Button until after I actually open them myself.

Those apps have always started when the phone is powered on. It's just that in previous versions they did not show on the Quick Launch screen if you had not opened them. It's not clear why you close apps, however; I never do, unless an app misbehaves. I currently have 120 apps in my Quick Launch screen and I see no ill effects from it.

See: http://www.howtogeek.com/204552/no-closing-background-apps-on-your-iphone-or-ipa d-wont-make-it-faster/

This is a known issue by Apple Support and not normal behavior. When you swipe away an app, it should not launch back automatically upon starting your iPhone. I just got off a chat session with Apple Support and they acknowledged the issue. The solution they walked me through that worked for me was to do a reset.

Settings > General > Reset > Reset All Settings.

Only thing I had to do afterwards to bring my phone back to its exact customized state was put my wallpaper back up and redo my finger print.

If this option does not work, the other solution Apple Support suggested was restore your iPhone from iTunes. Before you do either of these, be sure to search on Apple's site about Reset All Settings and Restore Backup.

thomas.gth wrote:

I have exacly the same problem.

You do not have a "problem." It doesn't matter what applications are listed in the Quick Launch view. They are not running, they are suspended. And applications can be running even if they are not visible in the Quick Launch view. Killing them there is not necessary unless they are not working correctly, and is a bad idea in general, as it slows your system. See: http://www.howtogeek.com/204552/no-closing-background-apps-on-your-iphone-or-ipa d-wont-make-it-faster/

bpow77 wrote:

Let me try and clarify this...

Before the iOS 9 update, when you turned your phone off and then turned it back on no apps were open. If you double tapped the home button there would be no apps open in the background because no apps had been used, because the phone had just started up.

Absolutely wrong. Before iOS 9, when you turned your phone off, then on again, the same apps that were displayed in the Quick Launch screen when you shut it off would still be displayed when you turned it back on. Likewise if you rebooted the phone. I know, I've been doing this cycle for over 8 years. And my 100 plus apps were there both before and after the power cycle. So if you are basing your "issue" on this it is a non-issue. Just to make sure I hadn't misremembered, I took my wife's 3GS running 6.1.6, checked which apps were listed, turned to phone off, then turned it back on and the same apps were still displayed in the Quick Launch ribbon. On my 4S and 6 I regularly turn them off, and when I turn them on the same apps are displayed. This was true in iOS 7 on the 4S, and iOS 8 on the 6.

If I misinterpreted what you said, and you really meant that you closed all of the apps before powering off, that's a different situation. Keep in mind that an app that shows in the screen when you double-press the HOME button is not running, and may not even be in memory. As the phone has only 1 GB RAM only a few apps can actually be in memory. So of the 120 apps that I can scroll through probably only 4 or 5 are actually in RAM. The rest have been flushed from memory, and only their ghost is displayed. And also keep in mind that even if an app does not appear when you double-press the HOME button that does not mean it is not running. Apps can run in background even if they don't appear when you double-press HOME. Or at least they could in the past.

Given that, I see what you are observing. After I flush all apps and power cycle the phone, if I double-press HOME immediately I don't see any apps. However, If I wait a minute before pressing I see Settings, Photo, Camera, Calendar, Phone, Music, App Store, Mail, Clock, Safari, Messages, Contacts, and Reminders. What all of these apps have in common is a background process that syncs them with iCloud or other Internet services. These apps have always had background processes since the beginning of iPhone time in 2007 (or since they were added to iOS). I suspect that the reason you see them is iOS 9 has been changed to show you what has actually been running in background all the time. Before iOS 9 they would be launched, but you wouldn't see them until you actually opened the app. Now with iOS 9 it is telling you what apps have been launched in background. So it is giving you more information than you had with earlier versions. It is not suddenly starting apps that had never been launched in earlier versions, just telling you more than you knew with earlier versions. And BTW, there's no point in killing any of them; they will still continue to wait in background for notifications.

crapple95 wrote:

The problem is that on reboot, applications that the user was not using before rebooting the phone pop up this recent apps place and need to be swiped up to terminate them from running in the background. I thought it was similar to in OSX where you can set applications to start with the logon of the user, so i went around looking for that but could only find "background app refresh" which is turned off globally on the phone, so that wasn't it.

The problem is that you don't get it. Apps that you see when you double press the HOME button ARE NOT RUNNING, in foreground or in background. They are suspended. If something such as a notification triggers their background process it will run, whether you seen them when you double-press the home screen or not. Terminating them just slows your phone down and wastes battery, and does not stop their background processes. It just hides them from you. If you don't want apps to run in background you do it in the Background Apps settings, not by double-pressing the HOME button.

It's not a big deal, and there is no need to close the Settings app. It uses no power, no data, and is not running even when it appears in the Quick Launch screen. It only runs when you open it and change a setting, and even that use is minimal.

I fact, there is no reason to close ANY app that way, unless it is misbehaving.

Interesting idea, but it's based on the mistaken view that apps in the Quick Launch screen are running. They are not. They are suspended unless they are the active app. They are not checking for updates.

The only apps that MIGHT be checking for updates are those that are enabled in Settings/General/Background App Refresh. If they are turned off there they are not checking for updates. And even if they ARE enabled there they are only rarely checking for updates.

Apps can respond to Notifications whether or not they are shown in the Quick Launch screen. So killing them does not stop Notification activity.

Why not close apps? That's explained in great detail in the link I provided. Because closing them increases battery drain. Because closing them takes time on your part, for no benefit. Because closing them slows down your iOS device when you next need one of those apps. Because closing any of the built in apps doesn't kill them; it just hides the fact that they are still loaded and ready.

Double tapping the Home button reveals the "Recently used" apps, it does not indicate running Apps.

Just an update; I called Apple support and the person I spoke to said that he has had quite a few calls regarding this 'quirk' and that it should NOT be happening regardless of if the app was running prior to phone shut down or not. If you close all apps before shutting the phone off then no apps should be already open when the phone reboots. He suspects that this will be something addressed in future updates. Also for the record, I just updated to iOS 9.1 and I now have a completely different set of apps that are open on reboot. Some are apps I haven't used for many months. It's not a huge issue but it is annoying.

I echo thomas.gth's sentiments. Thank you, bpow77, for calling Apple. At last we know that Apple is aware of the problem via numerous complaints and that what we're experiencing should not be occurring, and that there is nothing a customer can do about it. Now that we know that this is an Apple issue, there's no further need for anyone who experiences this problem to continue trying to fix it, much less entertain certain armchair advice based on "misinterpretation" that has proven to be a distraction at best. We should wait on Apple to fix this issue in an upcoming update and not risk screwing something else up on our phones by trying to fix it ourselves with wild goose chases.

I also updated to 9.1 and I still have the issue.

EDIT: I do have to continue to side with thomas.gth's observation, that these apps that open upon startup are those that were open at the time we updated our phones to 9.0.0.0.0.0.0. Because what I've noticed on my phone is eerily similar to what he's observed. Of course for others it might be random apps, but for me there is no random app that I've never used that is automatically opening upon phone startup.

No, these apps have not always run in the background like that automatically. Those are not the most recently used apps, those are apps running in the background. That is how multitasking works. They run in the background until you "quit" them by swiping up. When you turn off your phone completely, this all used to reset. Now when I turn on my phone, I have many many apps open (much more for me than the OP does, apps I haven't used in a while).

The ill effects of having too many apps open and running are decreased battery life and performance.

I'm sure you know more about it than I do, but you are completely wrong. In every respect. Swiping an app up does NOT kill its background process if it is a built in app. And if it is a 3rd party app that receives a notification it will start a background process that will not show up in the Quick Launch screen. The Quick Launch screen does not show apps with background processes, it shows apps that have been used in foreground. Period. Most apps in that screen don't even have background processes. The primary purpose of the Quick Launch screen is what it's name implies - a way to launch apps that have been previously used quickly. The most recently used (probably under a half dozen) are still in RAM in a standby state, so they launch very fast. The remainder are not in RAM at all and cannot run in background because they have been removed from memory. My quick launch screen currently holds 140 apps. Why isn't my phone slow as molasses, then?

And apparently you didn't read the link I posted, so here it is again: http://www.howtogeek.com/204552/no-closing-background-apps-on-your-iphone-or-ipa d-wont-make-it-faster/ It's always possible you know more than the writer of that article, also. If you do, take it up with him.

@Lawrence Finch - Seriously dude, you are missing the point. We all know that there are certain apps that run in the background. We know that ok. But those apps don't actually show as being open when you double press the home button, unless you have opened them of course. That's the difference here, the issue we are talking about here are OPEN apps as opposed to BACKGROUND RUNNING apps. A growing number of users are getting an issue where apps that aren't or haven't been opened - not running in the background, but opened - are showing as being open after rebooting their iphones or other iOS devices. In some cases there are a few apps in other cases people are getting every app on their phones being shown as open when they reboot their phones. Like I said in a previous post, I contacted Apple support and described the issue and was told that this is definitely not a new feature of iOS 9 and should NOT be happening. The end result was that Apple may look at fixing this issue in a future update.

Lawrence, I have read all of the posts on this thread as well as your posts. I'm not sure where the disconnect it but

1) the behavior has changed. Before installing iOS 9 on my iPad Air this NEVER happened (apps which I had done the "swipe up" action to remove them from whatever you want to call the multi-tasking display (we of course are not talking about the Siri Suggestions screen with recently used apps that you get when swiping to the right on the home screen but rather the multi-tasking display where you can scroll back and forth with apps that are in some form of multi-tasking mode - whatever Apple is doing with these apps). Regardless of what you call it - the behavior has changed. Before 9.0 when you "removed and app from the multi-tasking mode by swiping up" and then did a power reboot those apps were no longer available. Those of us who have chosen to frequently do this action - which by the way was highly recommended to me by an Apple Genius Bar person yesterday when I was discussing battery usage with him and a process he does every day or two - are very familiar with how it used to work and how it has changed. It is particularly troubling that the apps now "showing" in this multi-tasking mode are apps that had never been opened after installing iOS 9. So this problem is not limited to apps that I have opened and left open.

2) When queried, Apple has admitted that the behavior we are describing is NOT normal and that they are working on a fix.

So apparently we are discussing or perceiving different things. But please stop insisting that the behavior we are experiencing is normal and/or not new and/or not a problem. To be honest, if you rarely do a power reboot and usually keep dozens of apps open as you claim (that's a LOT of apps) then how would you have noticed the problem?

Let me try and clarify this...

Before the iOS 9 update, when you turned your phone off and then turned it back on no apps were open. If you double tapped the home button there would be no apps open in the background because no apps had been used, because the phone had just started up.

Ever since the iOS 9 update, if you turn your phone off and then turn it on, straight from boot up random apps are already open in the background. These are apps that haven't been recently used, or were open before shutting down the phone but seem to open by themselves once the phone reboots.

The only 'app' this happens to me with is Settings. Every time I turn my phone off and then turn it back on Settings is already open in the background regardless of if I had used it before turning my phone off or not. This NEVER happened before updating to iOS 9 and that is the issue that people in this thread are reporting. The amount of apps open vary and it doesn't matter if the apps were recently used or not. It's totally random.

Another example; My workmate bought an iPhone 6s and after turning it on and setting it up for the first time she found that every app on the phone was already open in the background. After hard rebooting a few times and even reinstalling iOS, She found another bunch of random apps opened.

So the point is, this did NOT happen before iOS 9. Not everyone is getting this issue and the amount of apps opened after rebooting varies for users who are experiencing this issue. It's a bug plain and simple.