Yeah...I suppose that was the answer I was looking for.
Except, I was leaning more towards this...What would you EF up if you weren't screwed in an app and you did close it by holding down the home button?
As mentioned, holding the home button is a force quit and no current app state data is saved. Also as mentioned, tapping the home button completely quits every third-party application and most native Apple applications.
The application state is never saved on a force quit. This is because that last state could have been the reason the app was locked up. Additionally, a force quit is a command to the OS, not the app. The app loses all control to execute save and cleanup processes.
You can see how in some apps, particularly productivity apps, force quitting could be very undesirable if current data is not saved.
Here's an example of what happens using the app MotionX Dice, but the result is the same with all apps
to some degree*.
Roll dice.
Hold two dice and keep three on the table.
Now exit normally by tapping the home button.
- The game state is saved.
Upon reopening MotionX Dice your dice look as they did when you quit.
- The same two dice in the hold tray and three on the table.
Now put all the dice back on the table and roll again.
This time save four dice and keep one on the table.
Now exit by holding the home button until the app force quits.
Upon reopening the app looks for the file which holds the last app state.
Since the app was force quit, the app state was not saved and the previous save state file still remains.
- The old state of two dice in the hold tray and three on the table reappear and the last session's data was lost.
*Some apps write the current state to another file after significant user events. Safari is an example of this.
On older iPhone OS releases, force quitting Safari would cause you to reopen to the pages you were on the last time you normally quit safari losing any pages opened during the last session. Now, each time you load a page in Safari that page is saved to an "open webpages" file and opening Safari after a force quit will now show all the pages you loaded during the last session before the force quit.
However, Safari will not open to the page you were viewing last (which is desired and is the behavior of quitting normally)- this is in case the page you were viewing last was hanging and the reason you force quit Safari. Reopening to that page would put you in an endless loop on the hanging page. So you still lose app state, but to enhance the experience you still retain all previously open pages.
... a long winded way of saying, don't force quit applications unless your having problems with that specific application.
