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Dispelling misconceptions about iOS background tasks

post #1 of 7
1/3/12 at 7:59am
Thread Starter 
Lucid and easily understood description from Fraser Speirs of just what regular users need to know about how apps are managed and why you generally don't need to close apps on a regular basis (like I understand you need to do regularly in Android for example. Again this is my understanding so if it's wrong blame the Android reviews and press, not me).

http://speirs.org/blog/2012/1/2/misconceptions-about-ios-multitasking.html
Quote:
There is one iOS "tip" that I keep hearing and it is wrong. Worse, I keep hearing it from supposedly authoritative sources. I have even heard it from the lips of Apple "Geniuses" in stores.

Here is the advice - and remember it is wrong:

All those apps in the multitasking bar on your iOS device are currently active and slowing it down, filling the device's memory or using up your battery. To maximise performance and battery life, you should kill them all manually.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. There are caveats to this but anyone dispensing the advice above is clearly uninformed enough that they will certainly not be aware of these subtleties.

Let me be as clear as I can be: the iOS multitasking bar does not contain "a list of all running apps". It contains "a list of recently used apps". The user never has to manage background tasks on iOS.
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post #2 of 7
1/7/12 at 10:57pm
Good information. I rarely ever clear out the multitasking bar, but I wondered why things I hadn't used in weeks were on there.

If I ask a quick, pretty much unrelated question instead of starting a new thread, would there be anger and sadness? The iPhone catchall threads seem to be dormant. Quickly:

If I upload a photo from my phone to Facebook or anywhere else, can people download the photos and grab my GPS data from them? If so, is there a quick way to strip it out?
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post #3 of 7
1/9/12 at 5:54am
Thread Starter 
You can turn off locations services in total or app by app in the settings menu.

If you have enabled location for photos then yes they can.

I don't know much about your background Greg, but let's assume you are an average American (and not say a billionaire or a high powered politician or someone worth kidnapping or otherwise harassing): So what? Why would anyone pick you out of the crowd to track your gps data and what could they do with it if they did?

I say the same thing to my parents and sister who are completely freaked out about pictures of my niece and nephews being on Flickr. They are rightly concerned that evil doers could be looking for kids pics, but then so what? There are a hundred billion pictures of kids on Flickr. If someone in their neighborhood has targeted these kids then pictures on Flickr isn't going to make kidnapping or otherwise attacking them any easier. Yes it's creepy that strangers might see your kids pictures, but hiding your life in a box because some boogeyman might see them is no way to live.
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post #4 of 7
1/9/12 at 1:57pm
I'm more concerned with some guy I went to elementary school with showing up on my doorstep. I'm picturing an Otis-from-Andy-Griffith type wanting a place to crash and some money. biggrin.gif
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post #5 of 7
1/10/12 at 6:08am
Thread Starter 
Hmmm, I gotcha but not sure I'd let that dictate my whole life....
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post #6 of 7
1/10/12 at 10:57am
I've got some pictures up on my FB (though I'm not exactly a regular user of the thing), and they're even global, so it's mainly just me wondering and not as big a deal as my initial post might have suggested. Thanks again for the info, though!
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post #7 of 7
1/13/12 at 6:34pm

That was a good article; I should probably spread it around to my non-tech iPhone-using friends.

 

I do find it necessary to manually kill apps sometimes. FaceBook has very buggy for a while. But even Apple's Music app freezes once in a while and I have to manually kill it to set it right.

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