Multi-tasking on iOS 4 is driving me crazy

[rotobadger]

I know its a little thing but is anyone else getting mildly frustrated that, since your apps are all running "frozen" in the background, when you open them up they're in exactly the same state you left them?

Drives me nuts with phone! If I call someone from my contacts, then hang up, the next time I go to make a phone call I have to back out of the last contact I called and go back to the main phone screen.

And Facebook has to be manually updated when you open it now.

I know...little things, but the phone contacts is driving me nuts!

 

[Randman]

Quit them so they have to refresh when you open them.

 

[rotobadger]

Quit them so they have to refresh when you open them.

Yeah, I tried doing that about 3 or 4 times and it was a pain in the ass. It's 6 of one or half a dozen of the other: Every time I finish a phone call, go to running apps, close it, close that window, lock phone.

OR

Leave it, go back to phone app, back out of last contact I called, go to new contact, make call.

I guess I'll get used to it. It would be nice if Apple sent an update allowing you to choose which apps run in background.

 

[Cubsfan]

And Facebook has to be manually updated when you open it now.

Blame facebook for that one. MLB, who appears to have implemented this correctly, updates immediately when you open/reopen it. Facebook was just probably lazy and didn't bother detecting when it was "reopened".

 

[VSMacOne]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8A293)

I for one am glad for the frozen state. It let's the apps open up faster. Yeah I may have to push an extra button but I don't have to go thru the opening screen and everything in the app to come up.
And for contacts, it's nice when you look at it from a different perspective OP ... When you try to make a call and have to get out of the phone app to check on something, it's nice to be able to get back to the same place in the contacts.

 

[spyda]

Facebook app is garbage. They need to try harder.

 

[Reluctant Adept]

Nothing new

Applications have always been encouraged to open back up as close as possible to where you left them, even before multi-tasking. It makes it possible to switch away from mail half-way through writing a message and come back without having to find the message in your drafts folder.

It works the same way in iOS 4 except now it's faster. How exactly is that a bad thing? Even if you force an application out of memory, it should launch back in pretty much the same state you left it in. It shouldn't be obvious to a end user that there's any difference at all.

I agree about Facebook - it's a bug and they should fix it ASAP. They get all the required notifications, they just need to do the right thing.

 

[rotobadger]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8A293)

And for contacts, it's nice when you look at it from a different perspective OP ... When you try to make a call and have to get out of the phone app to check on something, it's nice to be able to get back to the same place in the contacts.

Good point. Still, would love the option to turn on or off...

 

[VSMacOne]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8A293)

Facebook app is garbage. They need to try harder.

Feel like expanding on that thought???

 

[PeteLP]

I feel that there are pros and cons with the behavior. It's a trade off as with anything else.

On the phone, hitting the contact tab will get you quickly back to the contact list. (If it takes you to a contact's details, hitting the same tab a second time will take you to the list)

My feeling is that I often DO want to go back to where I was in context, and though that's not always the case, it IS always true that it's much, much quicker to return home from the middle of some saved state than it would be to get TO that state back from a home position.

So, Net Net I greatly prefer this over no saved context (and the speed of task switching is independently a HUGE win) but I would love a general UI feature that would allow one click to get to a home state as an alternate to the successive back buttons.

Pete