PSA: Don't force quit apps on iOS | Hacker News Reader

PSA: Don't force quit apps on iOS

daringfireball.net

15 pointsbeliu15 comments

"An awful lot of very hard work went into making iOS work like this. It’s a huge technical advantage that iOS holds over Android."

It would be good if Gruber just stuck to cheering Apple moves, because he shows his ignorance when he goes outside of the lines.

Android includes process freezing and, in a worst case of memory exhaustion, dehydration/rehydration. What Apple later added is virtually identical to what Android had already done in v1.0. Samsung for some odd reason buys the gimmick of process managers and aggressively kills background apps -- even when there is an overwhelming surplus of free memory -- but that doesn't make it a problem of Android.

> gimmick of process managers

My Asus Zenfone has a great little combo of preinstalled unremovable apps:

a) a process monitor that looks for battery wasting processes

b) Tripadvisor, which shows up in the battery wasting list every time..

>The other contributing factor to believing that force quitting is good for your iPhone are the handful of apps that have been found to be repeated abusers of loopholes in iOS, such that they really do continue running in the background, wasting battery life.

There are many such loopholes.

> There are many such loopholes.

Exactly. I force-quit apps for privacy reasons, not because I believe I'm better than software at memory-management and caching.

I realized how sad that statement is just as I was writing it. Our phones do not belong to us; they belong to the companies releasing the software that runs on them.

Honestly given that operating systems will frequently leave frozen apps running and have to prompt users to know whether to quit them (and in the case of Windows then prompt you some more for fun), or allow random background tasks to continue, I am definitely convinced that at the macro level, I am better at memory management than software is.

Facebook, Snapchat, others?

Those are apps. There are many loopholes. See https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/iP...

Something I've noticed on recent versions of iOS is how apps reset themselves if you don't switch back after a certain amount of time. The only exceptions are mapping apps like Google Maps and Waze.

Lets say I'm writing an email in Gmail, then I switch to Safari to research information. I spend five minutes in Safari, I copy a section, switch back to Gmail, but the app freezes then goes back to the inbox, losing whatever I wrote.

Vice versa, even if I switch back to Safari after a while, it'll refresh the page.

Happens to every non-mapping app I have. No app so far. will switch back to the exact state as I left it.

I experimented with this, and found that force closing everything, leaving only two apps which I'm switching between. Those two never lose their state.

The internet is full of "I have this same problem" but zero explanations/workarounds. Background App Refresh has no affect.

It's probably because those apps haven't implemented state restoration properly. Basically, the OS reserves the right to terminate your app at any point when it is in the background, and it is the job of the app to restore the state back to where it was. iOS provides hooks and a serialisation mechanism for the app, to make it easier.

This is purely anecdotal, but every so often I have a day where my battery is just shot before it's even lunchtime. I can usually pinpoint it to one of several apps, because the problem is ailed by force quitting those that I know are apps I used recently but don't usually use often.

That by no means says that force quitting all apps constantly does any good, but there are exceptions to where some apps just try to use more resources than you'd like, even when in the background.

Settings > Battery - look at the Battery usage by app figures.

I don't know what I am doing wrong, but it seems like I've had a ton of apps just crash/freeze on me as of late (looking at you Google) and the only way to fix it is to force quit apps. If an app does crash/freeze in the background how can I be certain its not draining my battery after all?

It's more of a habit than anything else at this point, but I've had multiple apps crash and need to be force-quit to reload properly. Facebook being the most common culprit.

I also have had some that seem to abuse running in the background and hurt battery life, so the necessary issues got me into the habit, and I have found no harm in continuing it.

For what it's worth, I now disable all background app refresh using the settings toggle anyway, so aside from rare crashes, it's all just habit now. Though, I find the comments from others here about privacy maybe another interesting reason to continue doing this

Force quitting prevents the app from waking in the background due to geo location updates, push etc.

Personally I prefer to force quit because it improves my battery life by reducing background updates on apps I'm not using.

"The single biggest misconception about iOS is that it’s good digital hygiene to force quit apps that you aren’t using"

Sounds like an opinion to me, but then again, I'm not even sure how misconceptions are measured.

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