Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Still no "close all" function
- Thread starter bluewomble88
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
"Note: It's typically unnecessary to force an app to close unless the app is unresponsive. You can view all recently used apps by double-clicking the Home button. These apps aren't open; they are in a suspended state."
/thread
Fzang
macrumors 65816
Apple should seriously reconsider their design of the multitasking view, as most people haven't got the tiniest clue as to how iOS actually operates. E.g. it could remove the app from the multitasking view if it has been been purged from RAM.
People think it's called multitasking like a computer and all these 100 apps on the list are simultaneously operating (though I can't explain why no one has pondered "how does my phone have 100 apps open without exploding?"). There should be a big fat sign saying "recently opened apps".
People think it's called multitasking like a computer and all these 100 apps on the list are simultaneously operating (though I can't explain why no one has pondered "how does my phone have 100 apps open without exploding?"). There should be a big fat sign saying "recently opened apps".
CutterSlade
macrumors regular
Wow, what a brilliant idea!!!! I didn't know I could do that.😛
Using this method, I can close 30 apps within a second right?
Armen
macrumors 604
How many times do we have to drag this dead horse out in the town square and beat it again? Here's another summary again on how this works.
The App switcher in iOS displays one of the following:
Open Apps: Some iOS apps have special permissions to run in the background regardless of where you are in the OS. Examples of these apps are Pandora, Spotify and Music. They will run in the background unless you close them. An exception to this are the native Phone, Messages and E-mail apps. These apps will ALWAYS run regardless if you close them or not. Their permission is "system".
Frozen Apps: These are apps that are not actually running (cpu usage) but iOS has let them hold on to the RAM they requested just in case the user decides to use the app in the near future.
iOS will kill these apps depending on which app is the most idle and release the RAM they had reserved back into available memory pool.
Recent Apps: Not only are these apps not running (using cpu) but they are not reserving RAM either. These are just shortcuts just like Word has "recent documents". Chances are if you restart your phone and see apps listed in the taskswitcher after the restart you are staring at recent apps.
Now on to close-all debate.
Every time you close an app you force the memory it was using to be released. When you open the same app again it uses cpu cycles to re-load it into Memory.
Closing and opening apps all day uses more Battery life than it does to let them sit there in a frozen state.
Again, iOS is supposed to close idle apps on it's own and recover RAM when it needs it. As a user you do NOT need to manually do this. The ability to close an app is there just in case the app acts up, freezes or won't respond.
If I remember correctly back in the day when an App froze in iOS you could hold the home button to "force close" it but now that just triggers Siri 😛
The App switcher in iOS displays one of the following:
Open Apps: Some iOS apps have special permissions to run in the background regardless of where you are in the OS. Examples of these apps are Pandora, Spotify and Music. They will run in the background unless you close them. An exception to this are the native Phone, Messages and E-mail apps. These apps will ALWAYS run regardless if you close them or not. Their permission is "system".
Frozen Apps: These are apps that are not actually running (cpu usage) but iOS has let them hold on to the RAM they requested just in case the user decides to use the app in the near future.
iOS will kill these apps depending on which app is the most idle and release the RAM they had reserved back into available memory pool.
Recent Apps: Not only are these apps not running (using cpu) but they are not reserving RAM either. These are just shortcuts just like Word has "recent documents". Chances are if you restart your phone and see apps listed in the taskswitcher after the restart you are staring at recent apps.
Now on to close-all debate.
Every time you close an app you force the memory it was using to be released. When you open the same app again it uses cpu cycles to re-load it into Memory.
Closing and opening apps all day uses more Battery life than it does to let them sit there in a frozen state.
Again, iOS is supposed to close idle apps on it's own and recover RAM when it needs it. As a user you do NOT need to manually do this. The ability to close an app is there just in case the app acts up, freezes or won't respond.
If I remember correctly back in the day when an App froze in iOS you could hold the home button to "force close" it but now that just triggers Siri 😛
nanogirl21
macrumors 6502a
Sure why not? Not sure why you have 30 apps open, but whatever floats your boat. 😛
A don't buy it.. I've used a close all tweak on JB ios7... It did help battery life... Plus it's nice to clear the list.
I never clear my multitasking window, so I have much more than that at any given time.
BaldiMac
macrumors G3
You can't have 30 apps or 20+ apps open or even suspended at the same time on an iOS device.
The "multitasking window" lists recently used apps. Being in the list does not mean that an app is open.
Armen
macrumors 604
Good luck. I've explained this concept of open, frozen, recent like 20 times in 20 different threads and people just don't get it.
Seems like the user behavior with Android Eclair somehow bled over to iOS.
CutterSlade
macrumors regular
Sorry but it's you guys who don't get it. I never said that the apps stay open. I said they keep appearing in the app switcher. Whether they are suspended or closed is irrelevant. Is that SO hard to understand?
I know precisely what iOS does to the apps in the background (I'm a developer). The problem here is that, it doesn't remove the apps it forced to terminate from that list, giving the impression that they're still open. This has its roots in the fake multitasking behaviour in iOS 4.0. They stay there unless you swipe their thumbnails up, making the list unnecessarily crowded. Having 20+ thumbnails in a screen that can display at most 3 items is not an efficient way for navigating between apps.
Last edited:
But they aren't open, that's basically the point. It's not a list of open apps, that's the misconception people need to understand and get out of.
VSMacOne
macrumors 603
There's a lot of misinformation out there, including from Apple itself. Went to the Genius Bar last week with my wife's iPhone that was having battery issues, and the genius started telling me that it's because of the number of apps she had "open". He said they need to be closed every day, and not have more than 8 open at one time. I started to contradict him but didn't really want to take even longer. Eventually they replaced the phone, but no wonder people are freaking out about a button to close all apps if this is the kind of information they receive at the Apple store.
CutterSlade
macrumors regular
Some of them are, some of them aren't.
The problem here is, everyone understands a different thing from the word "open". If you want to be precise, you'll never use that term because there is no such state as "open" in iOS.
The states an app can be in are
Not Running*
Active*
Inactive
Background
Suspended*
only the ones I marked with (*) are relevant for the users.
When saying "open", some people are referring to the "active" state, while others are referring to the "suspended" state.
That list contains "the apps that were active at some point in the past and weren't explicitly closed by the user". Apple says that it is the list of recently used apps but its implementation is not exactly as how you expect. A proper recently used apps list would remove some items if long time has passed since the user made it active (hence the word "recent"), but I haven't seen it remove anything from that list on its own.
With all these said, and I'm saying this the 3rd time:
I'm not saying that the apps on that list consume memory. Only the suspended ones do. The reason I want to remove them is to make the list less crowded so I can navigate between the suspended apps easily. I don't want to see a long list of previously used apps.
Last edited:
I could be off, but I think the most universal usage of "open" in the sense of software is mostly when people are talking about it being active in some way, either in the foreground or background. In any case, the point is that list there is just a list of recently used apps, not necessarily reflecting whether or not they are currently running in any way or anything else about their state beyond those apps being used by the user at some point in the (near) past.
BaldiMac
macrumors G3
Perhaps if you used the correct terms, it would make things clearer. You apparently don't want to be able to close apps, you want to be able to organize the list of recently used apps in the app switcher.
Your confusion seems to be that you want it to be a list of open apps like a desktop OS. It's not. It's a list of recently used apps.
CutterSlade
macrumors regular
That's right. It's certainly the most common use case of that word. (I couldn't convey it correctly in my previous message)
That's exactly what I said. No arguments about any of this. I already said what my problem was. I'm only speaking for myself and not defending anyone who got it all wrong.
BaldiMac
macrumors G3
Why? There is no reason for this behavior other than some OCD-like compulsion.
Same question. If you don't want to see a list longer than 6 items, don't scroll past item 6. The fact that there are more items in the list than you would like is completely irrelevant.
CutterSlade
macrumors regular
Yes, that's exactly what I'm after. Pretty much like pressing alt+tab on Windows. I know that list doesn't do that, that's why I want to have a close all button, so that I can clean the list before opening the apps I'm gonna use. I don't know of any other way for switching between several apps quickly. People call that screen "app/task switcher" but it isn't that in its current state.
----------
The reason is that it is a list of "recently" used apps.
I don't know maybe because I'm used to using that screen only as a way to switch between the apps I'm using, having unnecessary items there bothers me 🙂
Because of the same reason, I expected the order of the items there stay always the same at first, so that I could move between them using left and right swipes but since their ordering changes every time I open one, that doesn't work either 🙂 I think that this OS needs a better way for navigating between several apps quickly. At least some screen that shows more than 3 apps on iPad.
Last edited:
BaldiMac
macrumors G3
Again, clearing the list before opening the apps you are going to use has no significant impact on this workflow (other than slowing it down if you reopened any apps that you had closed from the suspended state. 🙂). The last five apps you open are going to be the first five apps on the list regardless of whether or not you clear the list.
----------
😀 Like I said, the only real reason is an OCD-like preference.
CutterSlade
macrumors regular
😀 Yeah I guess you're right. But it's not all my fault. That screen doesn't really look like a recently used apps list as in Android, iOS 6 or before. It shows huge thumbs so it makes me feel like as if I've just opened up expose in Mac. I had high expectations from that screen 🙂
Armen
macrumors 604
That genius needs to be fired to giving out garbage information like that.
----------
So you're complaining about the "recent" apps list? Sure, that annoys me too. There is a jailbreak tweak that removes recents but Apple hasn't officially made a move on this yet.
jclardy
macrumors 601
Yes - it is like cold starting a car versus keeping the engine running. But in this case the "running" engine does not cost any energy as the RAM is being powered either way.
When you close an app it has to reload all of its assets from flash memory which both takes a longer time and uses more energy than if you had left it open, which means all the assets are already loaded into RAM. The system will automatically "close" unused apps if it is lacking RAM for new apps. Those apps will still show up in the switcher but will be reloaded from scratch when you tap on them.
The only case where it helps to close an app are if it is actively doing something in the background - like updating location in a GPS app for example.