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“To access the fast app switcher in iOS 4, double click the home button on iPhone 4 iPhone 3GS, or iPod touch G3. The interface will slide up and reveal a second dock-like set of app icons ‘in the background,'” Ritchie reports. “To kill an app, tap and hold the app until the icons begin to jiggle, then tap the minus symbol (-) at the top left corner.”
“This force quit or kill action will do a couple of different things depending on the type of app,” Ritchie reports. “First, with built-in Apple apps, if you kill them from the fast app switcher, they will still keep running in the background. For example, if you kill Mail you will still receive Mail (it doesn’t kill the background thread that checks, sounds/vibrates, and updates the badge). Instead, it will force the background thread(s) to restart… For App Store apps, if you kill them from the fast app switcher they will no longer function in the background. You’ll still get push notifications because those are handled by an external server, but you’ll lose things like background music playing, navigation, VoIP, and saved state.”
Ritchie reports, “Remember, you don’t generally have to manage background apps in iOS 4. For apps that aren’t streaming music, location (turn-by-turn navigation), or VoIP (like Skype) you only ever need kill them if they’re obviously not working right.”
Full article here.
Been killing MDN to get rid of the badges that wouldn’t refresh, until today’s update. Thanks MDN
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I’d like to see a preference setting that let’s me specify to always kill certain apps so they won’t run in the background e.g. Maps; Trapster etc
Wow. So if I want to bring Pandora back up, all I have to do is scroll through the 87 apps that I have used in the last few days to find the one that is still active?
It is easier to just go back to the original window.
Not a good implementation, Apple.
Please reserve the switching pane for active apps only.
Nice … But been doing this with sbsettings. And switching wifi and 3G and brightness etc etc.
Mdn word: hope — hope apple with develop this natively.
When my 3GS gets sluggish (several seconds to respond to the unlock swipe, choppy page scrolling, etc) I’m usually down to 5 MB of memory according to SystemStats. Killing Safari, in which I usually have 3-5 pages open, often frees up over 100 MB of memory, and the phone is instantly snappy again.
Mossman
Have you tried the “FreeMemory” app?
John
What is ‘sbsettings’?
uh – these are just the normal instructions? what is the article about?
THANK YOU MDN for updating your app to get rid of that damn badge.
@ TowerTone:
Fast app switching is only really meant to be used if you’re going back and forth between a few different apps (ie, emailing someone while playing solitaire). If you haven’t used an app in a while, of course you’d go back to the home screen to get it more quickly. This is just another option that is faster in some instances.
TowerTone’s comment clearly suggests Apple should’ve either capped the number of apps in the fast switcher to a much lower number, or automatically removed them from the list when its resources are completely removed from memory
Jay-Z
Exactly, which is why it is ridiculous to have every app used, active or not, thrown down there.
Mossman
Well put.
@ TowerTone and Mossman,
Bull
There is no need to worry about how many apps are in the bottom of th efast switcher. It doesnt matter, the affect is the same. In addition, I have not seen anything that show me that Apple should “reduce” the number of apps running in the background. The memory used would just be a small amount on the SSD, not the internal ram so the effect is not exisitant. The ability to completely shut down an app is there because software is not perfect and hangs on all systems.
TowerTone, mossman, Jay-Z :
Please chime in here – Apple listens :
http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html
Anyone know how to stop the copilot nav app from running in the background short of killing it? I can’t find any option in it to turn it off!
Who’s John Galt?
Joe
Who said anything about memory? If I have one or two apps that are actually running, it is silly to have to scroll through several others that are not running just to find the ones that are.
Read a little slower next time.
after turning off multitasking and background wallpaper on my iphone 4 it is by far BY FAR the fastest handheld I have evar SEEN!
Reducing the number of things in your Spotlight Search settings helps with speed too.
had to jailbreak and edit a text file to turn off those features
thank you for this article it was very useful
it’s not exactly FAST app switching if you have to scroll through 30 apps to get to the one you want. it would be faster to just scroll through the home screens.
apple needs to decide if the bar is for FAST app switching, or for displaying the ACTIVE apps in the background.
not both.
showing both defeats both purposes.
@Greg – good call. Only apps that request a background thread should be in the list. Weather, etc. should not be down there.
“Who’s John Galt?”
I dunno…(shrugs)
John Galt? He was the founder of the city I live in, no shit.