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Comment by snailmailman | Hacker News Reader

At least on iPhone, it basically doesn't do anything. Apple aggressively kills all background apps automatically. the "open" apps in the switcher are almost always just screenshots of previously-open-but-now-closed apps. if it was recent, the latest app or two in the switcher might actually be open, but rarely more than that.

Despite this, many of my relatives have somehow learned this habit of opening the switcher and closing all apps when they are done with them.

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Android has always been quite vigilant and is prompt to kill off any app at the MFA login screen while I am consulting the Oracle of Authenticator in another task. Thanks Android!

That being said, I dislike having 3 dozen apps open because I simply can’t quickly find and switch to the ones I’m using. So when I enter a new situation, I swipe all the way left, and Clear All apps, to start over with a tabula rasa.

The app I use is gone from the app store, but like Spotlight or the Windows Start Menu > type-to-search (before it got utterly shittified with web search/does it have AI now?), I have an Android app called App Search+ on the bottom left of my Android home screen.

Open it, and it opens a list of recently searched for apps. The focus is on the top search bar (and the keyboard has also popped up), and I can type to find any app I have installed.

i’m convinced the real reason people do this is because they don’t want anyone to see what apps they were using.

If you just have every app in the switcher, it becomes useless too.

iOS has never worked the way you are describing. It's easy to disprove your claim that the app is killed by just switching between different apps you have open. iOS keeps the apps open to make it fast to switch back to them.

Well, it closes the apps somewhat arbitrarily, but they definitely arent all open. If the most recent app is a resource-intensive game or something it will more aggressively close things. but you can have more open if they are all lightweight apps.

But the switcher shows every app ever opened and tries to pretend these apps aren't being closed. Right now for instance, i just checked and as best i can tell, the last 3 were open. going back any further and i could tell the app had to reload. but i can scroll to the left back forever. the one on the furthest left i easily haven't opened for months

I do this also - but wonder because I'll have some app open, phone gets warm. Close the app and it cools down.

Being able to go back 3 already contradicts the claim that it was rare to be more than 2. It works the same as Android. Android kills apps based off of resource usage but keeps screenshots of them in the task switcher.

This is literally always how iOS has worked. You can refer to the application lifecycle documentation: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/managing-you...

What point are you trying to make. The documentation doesn't say the OS only keeps a single app process running at a time.

The document is clear that the expectation from the developer is that you need to be ready for your app to be snapshotted and frozen/killed at any moment when it is not on the foreground.

The page you linked to doesn't say that anywhere.

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