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Bug IOS Programming

Complaints Mounting About iOS 13.2 Being 'More Aggressive at Killing Background Apps and Tasks' (macrumors.com) 52

Apple's iOS 13 has had a rocky start since its release last month, with it being among the most buggy Apple software releases in recent memory. Now, iPhone owners are complaining of yet another issue that may be bug-related. From a report: A growing number of iPhone and iPad users have complained about poor RAM management on iOS 13 and iPadOS 13, leading to apps like Safari, YouTube, and Overcast reloading more frequently upon being reopened. We've lightly edited some of the comments to correct things like capitalization.
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Complaints Mounting About iOS 13.2 Being 'More Aggressive at Killing Background Apps and Tasks'

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  • Privacy matters. Stability, not so much.

    But as long as you're willing to continue to cough up more cash, Apple really doesn't care much either way.

    • Privacy matters. Stability, not so much.

      But as long as you're willing to continue to cough up more cash, Apple really doesn't care much either way.

      Privacy or battery life? iPhones seem expensive either way.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It would help if Apple want stingy with RAM. The iPhone 11 has just 4GB, where as other flagships come with 8 or 12GB.

      • last I read the note has 3 different assistants that run in the background at the same time

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          You read wrong. You can completely disable Bixby (the only one it comes with) and install whatever one you want.

          Can you replace Siri?

      • It would help if Apple want stingy with RAM. The iPhone 11 has just 4GB, where as other flagships come with 8 or 12GB.

        They are completely different software platforms, though, so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison (pun semi-intended). And while Google is using their own version of Java rather than Oracle’s, Java apps aren’t exactly known for being lean and efficient.

      • This is not the problem. Apps like Overcast are being killed while the screen is locked and all that's happened is the podcast has been paused. I know, because this is the way that it manifests most for me.

        Also, this is a recent development—iOS 12 had no such trouble (on my iPhone XR). You'd open apps up much later, and even if you'd opened a bunch of others previously, it would come up like it had never been interrupted.

        Maybe Apple should be less stingy with RAM, but this isn't a problem that's hinge

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          That's a design flaw in the OS. On Android an app like that can keep the notification with playback controls alive when when the main app is purged from memory.

          Apps don't need to be fully loaded or running for that kind of thing.

  • last thing I want is crappy code running in the background or me watching porn and some of that crap trying to connect to the internet in the background when I'm at work

    • Maybe don't let your personal phone connect to the company internet? Just a suggestion.
    • by robsku ( 1381635 )

      Funny how we don't need automatical app killer in our desktop OS's to prevent that from happening. The whole automatic killing of background apps is totally crap idea.

      • Re:best feature ever (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Yaztromo ( 655250 ) on Thursday October 31, 2019 @03:15PM (#59367548) Homepage Journal

        Funny how we don't need automatical app killer in our desktop OS's to prevent that from happening.

        Every desktop OS has this. In Linux, it's known as the OOM Killer [linux-mm.org], and it's job is to do exactly what you describe -- it finds and kills apps when you've hit an out-of-memory situation.

        You don't see it activate on most desktop machines, as you're likely to have a ton of RAM and a fast hard drive for swap. Phones don't have swap space and are more RAM limited. But if you turn off swap and run a Linux desktop with 4GB of RAM, you'll see the OOM Killer removing processes too.

        Yaz

        • by robsku ( 1381635 )

          Funny how we don't need automatical app killer in our desktop OS's to prevent that from happening.

          Every desktop OS has this. In Linux, it's known as the OOM Killer [linux-mm.org], and it's job is to do exactly what you describe -- it finds and kills apps when you've hit an out-of-memory situation.

          I know, and it's totally different from what the mobile phone OS's do. Desktop OS's do this in a case of emergency, it's not part of their everyday activities.

          You don't see it activate on most desktop machines, as you're likely to have a ton of RAM and a fast hard drive for swap. Phones don't have swap space and are more RAM limited. But if you turn off swap and run a Linux desktop with 4GB of RAM, you'll see the OOM Killer removing processes too.

          Yaz

          I haven't - you know why? Because when the system starts stalling and wheezing, the first thing I'll be doing is entering this into terminal window:

          killall -9 firefox-bin

          ...before it starts killing other apps. And I actually have one PC with only 4GB's of RAM - it's my old netbook, which I use constantly, but only for the jobs that it's up to. The f

    • last thing I want is crappy code running in the background

      Don't install crappy apps.

      or me watching porn and some of that crap trying to connect to the internet in the background when I'm at work

      Isn't Apple supposed to protect you from that? And also from crap trying to connect to the internet in the background?

  • Drives me nuts dealing with various kinds of apps from terminals to VOIP to just switching apps. They pushed it way too hard. I went from being able to do 90% of my work on the iPad to maybe 50%, unfortunately while on a road trip. Makes me really just want dumb laptops going forward. A device for each task...

    Pushing backwards all the time...

    • by Strider- ( 39683 )

      Bingo... It used to be that background SSH (or MOSH) connections in terminus would stay live for 5 to 10 minutes or so... now they basically go away instantly. This makes it dramatically more difficult to do a lot of maintenance tasks while I'm on my phone.

      Of course, the MOSH thing is probably just the crappy implementation in Terminus; it should be entirely possible to re-establish a mosh session on the fly.

      • Yup! Termius used to be viable, now I need to use phone, iPad, and wife’s phone to troubleshoot some things on a server... and the crappy VNC apps to get to my desktop now...

        Off my lawn, whipper snappers!

  • ...processes should be left totally in control of the user.

    • Do you really think that tablet users, the majority of which chose a tablet because they can't handle a computer, will understand what background tasks are and which ones should be left alone and which ones can be safely closed?

      • Professional users, programmers, and developers often use self generated code, code from friends, and programs from sketchy sources. That's our job. We know the risks. Maybe there should be some kind of separation between the average user and the professional. Make safe software for my Grandma but also allow for us professionals to do our jobs. Maybe Apple could sell some hardware called, I don't know, let's call it "Pro" and some operating system that allows us to run unsigned code. Fucking iOS 13 ha
      • There should at least be a switch for "PC mode" that makes the behaviour of the OS process management facilities more like that of a PC. I should be able to have processes running all the time in the background if I choose to do so.
  • by organgtool ( 966989 ) on Thursday October 31, 2019 @03:01PM (#59367462)
    With Windows 10, it's easy to understand why it has so many quality issues after Microsoft reportedly fired much of their QA department. But what is going on at Apple that their software has become so shoddy lately?
    • It's just the slow collapse of their reality distortion field. Nothing has changed it's just that now the flaws are not obscured by the hype of all the "cool" new features.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Lately? Apple Maps 1.0 was so bad it could kill you. At one time you could crash most MacOS apps with seven keystrokes. Then there was GOTO FAIL.

      They are like every other software company, just average at QA, always have been.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      Probably the same. :(

  • ...has always been the overzelous killing background apps. Sometimes you can't switch app to take or make a phone call or read an sms message without it having killed the app you switched from when you switch back.

    Personally I'd like Maemo-like solution where you kill apps, not the OS. It's unusable as general purpose OS when it kills apps without being specifically asked to do so.

    • I seem to recall Steve Jobs saying something to the effect of "if your device needs a task killer you're doing it wrong."
  • by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Thursday October 31, 2019 @03:12PM (#59367518)
    The comments needing correction must have been typed on an Apple butterfly keyboard.
  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Thursday October 31, 2019 @03:13PM (#59367534)

    I have a couple older devices - iPad Mini 4 and iPhone 6s. Both have batteries which are in good shape, according to both Apple’s internal tools and third-party ones. Both were running just fine on iOS 12.

    But the battery drain on iOS 13 has been bad - subjectively I’d say 30-40 percent faster when actively using either device, based on what I see after my 90 minute train commute. And there have been a couple instances where (on the phone) I was able to watch the displayed percentage slowly tick down (65....64....63....).

    That’s rather ridiculous, especially for a software update which is supposedly clamping down on third party activity.

  • -- its a feature
    -- apple knows what they are doing
    -- you should only have one app running at time any
    -- apple got caught CPU throttling now they are Task throttling
  • by guacamole ( 24270 ) on Thursday October 31, 2019 @03:46PM (#59367694)

    I believe since at least version 6.0, both the AOSP as well as the vendors introduced services that went aggressively against background tasks. Some of the most common victims were music or podcast players. The worst was probably Huawei's EMUI that constantly killed either a playing music player or the Bluetooth service, so after a few minutes either the play is killed, so the start-stop controls no longer work, or the sound stops playing through the Bluetooth headphones or speakers even though the BT devices remains synced and "connected". Sometimes this could be disabled with some tinkering with adb.

    • I bought a Honor (Huawei's sub brand) phone and the default settings were killing background processes way too aggresively. Thankfully, there was a toggle in the settings to turn that off.
      I haven't had that problem with other brands (Samsung, LG). My current LG, at least, keeps background processes alive for a fair amount of time
  • What I want is a "speak when you're spoken to" setting for apps. Unless I chose to open the app, it sits there in storage doing nothing. That mean nothing. It use no memory, no processor cycles, no power, no data and it totally incapable of contacting the mothership unless I actively awaken it. This would be controlled by my choice of settings and not the developers.
  • ... and accumulate mere followers,

    then as soon as you die, your now headless company will start dying too,

    dear Steve Jobs.

  • the re-released iOS update (13.2.1?) isn't bricking HomePods anymore.

  • by clonehappy ( 655530 ) on Thursday October 31, 2019 @07:56PM (#59368432)

    Back to 2009 and using Android 2.3 Gingerbread. It's than unfinished and unpolished. It's a huge step backwards (as, arguably, was iOS 11 and 12 but those were subtle) that's noticeable.

    I've been a borderline-fanboy of Apple for years, if only because they seemingly (at least pay lip service to) care about protecting my privacy. Google is a personal privacy nightmare and data vacuum which is abhorrent to me, and even I am considering switching back after buying a new iPhone this year and being sorely disappointed. I only bought a new one because I thought my iPhone 7 was dying after updating to 13 (from 10, where I held out for years because of a few applications that will never be upgraded to 64-bit - but I like dark modes so I wanted that even though I knew it was going to be worse) but no, it was just the OS being that shitty.

    Every version of iOS was arguably better than the last up until iOS 10. 7 was ugly, flat UI design is complete garbage, but I get why they had to jump on the bandwagon. It looked "dated" but was fully functional and flat UIs are usability nightmares but the functionality, the polish, it was all still there. It's now utter garbage.

    Things I deal with in iOS 13 that I haven't had to deal with since early Android versions:

    1. Apps constantly freezing. No response from the screen at all, completely locked up and they don't auto-kill like they used to when apps would freeze on iOS. Not just 3rd party apps, but simple things like the "Settings" app.

    2. Passcode entry is broken. They really, really want you to use Face ID. I used to be able to enter my passcode nearly as fast as the biometric unlocks took. Now, it randomly "skips" numbers in my passcode. I see the UI feedback that I touched the number, but it just fails to register as an entry.

    3. Apps that play audio no longer stop by default when a headset, bluetooth device, or other audio output disconnects. So if I'm listening in my car and shut it off, or listening in the office to music or podcasts and turn off my headset, the audio comes blasting out of the phone at full volume. This is mobile device 101 here. A few apps have a setting that you can control, but most don't, and I use many different ones. This used to work as expected where things paused when audio connection was lost.

    4. Email notifications come in normally, but the messages don't show up in the mail app. You can manually refresh until the end of time, but you either have to swipe out of the app or completely kill it and reopen for the messages to show up right away. Or just wait, they usually update eventually but when you want to read an email right now, it's infuriating.

    5. Weather app does not update location reliably, even upon force-closing and reopening. A minor annoyance, but the weather and temperature can vary wildly around my region in just a half hour or so of driving. So when you want to see what to expect temperature-wise when getting out of the car after a drive, or what the weather is going to be "right here" in a few hours, you just have to wait or enter the location manually.

    This all continued after a factory-reset and fresh install of applications (not restoring from a possibly corrupted backup), and on 2 different devices so it's not me it's them. There are other broken things I'm sure but I just can't think of them right now. However, when Apple is making someone as privacy-aware as me start seriously considering a Pixel, they've made a mistake. Apple products are on a serious decline across the board, and from someone who has owned and used their products literally since the Apple ][, I doub't I'll every buy another one unless things turn around quickly.

    • I wish that I had started replacing all my family's Apple kit as devices turned over the minute I learned I couldn't use print from my iPad to the laser printer my iMac was serving up via IPP on my home network without a paid 3rd party app.

      Flash forward a few years, and that trusty old iMac with its laser printer is still chugging along (both have had their RAM maxed out), but having been left behind by OS major versions I now need to hand-edit config files every time there's a minor update so that my wife'

    • I haven't seen 1, 2 or 3 in my use at all—in fact, this is the first I've heard of them. But that said, I don't disbelieve you. iOS 13 has been a bit of a crap shoot.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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