
PSA: Don't force quit apps on iOS - beliu
https://daringfireball.net/2017/07/you_should_not_force_quit_apps
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endorphone
"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.

~~~
pjc50
> 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..

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trevyn
> _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.

~~~
isomorphic
> 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.

~~~
MiddleEndian
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.

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kawfey
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.

~~~
andybest
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.

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kfriede
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.

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

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dvcc
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?

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kup0
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

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kookiekrak
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.

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copperred
"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.

