Again, I can't replicate that on this Mini 2 with only 1GB RAM. GV open and current texting session displayed with a few photos just sent to me in that session on screen. I hit the home button for the home screen, then take a look at Music app, then Mail, then Settings and then I click GV and it looks as I left it (no reload of any kind).
So, to tax it (to try to eat up more RAM), I open Safari and load Apple.com, which has a LOT of images these days. I scroll to the bottom of Apple.com to be sure all of the images display on this page. This means I have 6 apps open now.
Then, again, I click home button, choose the Music app, home button, Mail, home button, Settings, home button, iMessage and then home button, GV and the exact same open texting session (with images showing) pops right up- no reload of any kind.
Pushing harder, I open News too. And Maps and display the Map in Satt view. I have 8 apps open that seem like they should each want a fair chunk of RAM. I display each:
- Safari, Apple.com and scroll to the bottom to be sure all images on that page right now are loaded. Now this page reloads but VERY quickly- maybe 1 second to display all. I presume cached vs. a fresh reload because it seemed too fast to be fetching the full page again from scratch.
- Home button, then Maps opens the SATT map as I just left it- no reload at all
- Home button, then News opens with the stories and images as I just left it- no reload at all
- Home button, Music, no reload- list of music as I just left it
- Home button, Mail, no reload- message I just viewed fully displayed
- Home button, Messages, reloads but VERY quickly- maybe 1 second to display message list
- Home button, Google Voice, displays the text communication as I left it EXCEPT one of 2 images in the current text reloads (pretty quickly).
Now clearly, if I keep opening apps, those reloads WILL happen more often because there is only so much RAM. But that's twice as many apps as I tend to have open at any time in how I use it.
I also expect that those 1-second reloads (presumably cached) will get slower if would open a bunch of complicated web pages in tabs in Safari or maybe run a big game app that needs big data, iMovie with many assets, GarageBand with a complicated set of tracks, etc.
BUT, if I use it more typically as I use it, I'll have only a couple of apps open at once and GV doesn't seem to reload when I access it... or perhaps I just don't notice because the reload is fast. Even with the above load, I don't have a sense of "constantly" reloading. Perhaps if I started doing something in an app, then cycled through all of that and returned to the app, it might/prob reloads and maybe I lose my place. But how I deal with that is just finish what I start before I jump to something else in some other app.
One more thing I wonder is what would happen if I had LOTS of cached texts in GV and iMessage? Maybe if I had LOTS of them with many being lengthy and holding lots of images, perhaps that would make this 1GB RAM have to reload like you describe. I only have 10-20 text conversations open at any given time. When they get lengthy or image loaded, I tend to close them and then start a new conversation with those people.
Else, I'm at a loss. Based on my own experience, I would expect 3GB or 4GB RAM to be
abundant memory based upon how I use iPads. And if I had EVERYTHING closed and a fresh reboot and only had 1 app opened- GV and flipped to the home screen and back, I would NEVER expect GV to reload unless perhaps I had LOTS of text conversations stacked up or something like that.
All that offered (mostly for others viewing this thread and worried that this 4GB new Mini is going to "constantly reload pages and apps"), I certainly would have welcomed more RAM in this new 6 too. But based upon how I use iPads, 1GB RAM (and I think only an A7 brain) seems to work well, so I think 4GB (and A15) will be spectacular (for my ways of using iPad).