iPhone 101: Quitting apps in iOS 4

The way that is suggested in the article has one drawback from the app programming perspective: the application does not receive the "applicationWillTerminate" callback if it is terminated this way (it is a hard "shutdown").

If the application performs any cleanup in this call or if it persists some data here, you will lose the cleanup and the persisted data... The idea is that you should not need to kill apps (theory... indeed...).

If Apple suggests terminating the apps in some way, it is good thing to follow the recommendations whenever possible.

My i4 as well as my wife's i4, as well as every other person I have asked that has an i4 all have experienced this slowdown of performance and improvement post app shutdown through the multitasking manager.

Bottom line....multitasking needs an on/off switch or needs to be completely removed. It worked just fine before multitasking.

Any app that tracks GPS and still does it in background where it does not make sense, is just a badly written app. Email the author and tell them to fix it.

I would like Apple to create a better (read: quicker) way to simply quit apps. I use Waze GPS constantly when driving (or riding in any vehicle), but I want to end it anytime I stop. Why? Aside from obvious battery life, it is also communicating real-time traffic info. If it sees me sitting in the same place for several minutes, then it alerts other Waze users that traffic isn't moving at my location and marks the road in red. Waze did design their backgrounding smarter than most (all?) other similar apps, in that it is designed to automatically shut down after 10 minutes of non-movement. However, if I parked my car and then walked somewhere for 10 minutes, of course it would typically think I'm instead in very slow-moving traffic and alert nearby users. (And of course, it's also draining the battery at the same time). I've been quitting the app from the recent apps list, as using Apple's recommended way is simply too time consuming. We need a better way, such as holding the Home button (does anyone regularly access Voice Command that way?).

I realize that everything being reported isn't stating this but it does SEEM like my iphone battery consumption is much greater when I leave a few items in the "fast switch" state. i.e. I don't manually quit them by pushing the red circle.

Is anyone else dealing with this?

@kkaplan Trapster is actually working on an update to help with this issue. I think a lot of location-based apps are going to have to do the same.

Actually....push email with Gmail does not work unless you force quit the mail application. If it is sitting in the multitasking task bar below......mail does not get automatically pushed to the phone (iphone 4). You'd have to open the mail app and have it check for new mail.

If, however, you force quit the mail application as outlined in the article, mail immediately gets pushed to the phone.

Force quitting doesn't work on my iPhone 4. Double clicking the home button still shows the app.

Is it just me that's disapointed at the way it's been implemented from a user's point of view? When I quit an app, I would expect it to quit like on my Mac. I would have like to see something like double-click quits the app but leaves it running in the background while one click completely quits it. Going back to the list of running apps to find 18 of them running, I have to scroll longer to get at the app that I want than going through the screens. Maybe there's something I don't get...

"There's actually a much simpler approach for quitting apps, and that's to use your recent app list. Double-click the home button to display the recently accessed applications. Press and hold any of the icons shown, then navigate to the application you want to quit and tap the red circled minus button. This sends a signal to the application in question that allows it to quit."

That's actually a pretty bad way to do it. You should *first* navigate to the icon for the application you want to close, *then* press and hold the icon until the minus button appears. Doing it in the order you suggest greatly increases the likelihood of closing the wrong application while navigating to the icon you're looking for.