My understanding of reality is pretty straightforward - "Over the last 3-4 years, I normally get 36-48 hours of casual use out of my iPhone, or 24 hours of really aggressive use, but, for some reason, on some days, while my iPhone is at the home screen, it is really hot and the battery is draining to zero quickly. Shutting down all of the apps in the task bar, or, rebooting the iPhone, immediately fixes that."
Couldn't we allow for the possibility of a bug in IOS that results in a deviation from the behavior explained in the article? Or, more likely, an application that is using IOS as designed, but in a way that results in extended background processing and CPU drain?
The good news is that another contributor posted a link to "Instruments" - which should let me get a diagnostic trace off my iPhone and determine which of the apps is actually pulling down the battery. I then have the options of (A) figuring out if there is a pref in that App to cause it to stop using battery when backgrounded, (B) Contact the application writer and let them know they have a poorly behaving App, and (C) (most important for me) - Reduce the number of applications I need to shut down to just the misbehaving ones.
Until then - count me in that category of users who believes (through experience) that the advice the Apple Geniuses are giving, that is, to terminate applications when you have an iPhone that is performing differently than when it is initially booted up, is good advice and is a real-world fix to this class of problem. (Though rebooting your iPhone accomplishes the same thing in my experience as well)
> Couldn't we allow for the possibility of a bug in IOS that results in a deviation from the behavior explained in the article?
No, because there is absolutely no reason to believe this is the case and no one has ever observed a non-privleged app store approved app outliving its OS-mandated termination deadlines.
> Or, more likely, an application that is using IOS as designed, but in a way that results in extended background processing and CPU drain?
ie) there's a bug in a background process that causes it to eat CPU? Yes, this is what you are actually experiencing, and this is 100% compatible with the facts presented in this article. Accepting this means you've entirely moved away from your previous "theory vs reality" nonsense.
> Until then - count me in that category of users who believes (through experience) that the advice the Apple Geniuses are giving, that is, to terminate applications when you have an iPhone that is performing differently than when it is initially booted up, is good advice and is a real-world fix to this class of problem. (Though rebooting your iPhone accomplishes the same thing in my experience as well)
Indeed rebooting your phone will terminate all processes running on the phone. This should be pretty obvious. Clearing out a list of previously run applications willy nilly is, on the other hand, superstitious hokum. You need to specifically target only those apps with infinite background privileges, which are few and far between.
What is your guidance when my iPhone is in battery-draining/Hot mode while at the home screen and I need to fix it? If I'm engaging in superstitious hokum by terminating all the apps in the MRU/Multi-Tasking bar, what is your advice to fixing my problem? Keep in mind, that if I've been only using the iPhone for a day or so since I last killed/removed all the apps - terminating everything in the MRU bar takes about 30 seconds versus a minute or so for a reboot.
Thanks for taking time to provide your insight on this topic - I'm looking forward (honestly) to your advice.
I'd identify the particular app that's causing your issues; instead of mass clearing out the recents list, or rebooting, slowly signal to the OS that you're done with each app, one at a time, and determine whether your phone continues to run hot and drain battery after each closure.
Eventually you'll narrow it down to the app with background privileges that's causing you grief.
Kick that app off your phone, or otherwise stop running it. If you can't live without it, then the next time your battery life goes to hell, go into the recents list and remove only the troublesome app in question, so that the OS knows you're done with it and kills its (presumably crashed or busy-looping) background thread.
Desist worrying about how many apps are in your recents list in general, because that's not a really related to the underlying problems you're experiencing.
Yes - I've tried that a number of times - the problem is you always _think_ you got the right app, but you are never 100% certain. And you are always worried that you just happened to have shut down an App, at the same time that the poorly behaving background app decided to Idle a bit.
Better solution will be for Apple to just tell us how much power each of the running apps have used in the last 1,5,10 minutes.
I agree 100% that the user _shouldn't_ have to worry about that, but when they do, it's annoying that it's so difficult to track down the problem.
Re: "Indeed rebooting your phone will terminate all processes running on the phone. This should be pretty obvious."
Not so obvious. When you reboot OS X version 10.7, it restarts all of the processes that where running when you rebooted it (and loads all of the files you were looking at) - so in that operating system, the only way to shut down an errant application is to track it down and kill it.
> Not so obvious. When you reboot OS X version 10.7, it restarts all of the processes that where running when you rebooted it (and loads all of the files you were looking at) - so in that operating system, the only way to shut down an errant application is to track it down and kill it.
Not really. 10.7 relaunches the app, but doesn't load up an image of the previously-loaded executable image and restore the program counter or anything -- after a reboot you don't get restored right back into an infinite loop bug; the program has been restarted, and the OS just asked it to re-open any files it was using before.
Couldn't we allow for the possibility of a bug in IOS that results in a deviation from the behavior explained in the article? Or, more likely, an application that is using IOS as designed, but in a way that results in extended background processing and CPU drain?
The good news is that another contributor posted a link to "Instruments" - which should let me get a diagnostic trace off my iPhone and determine which of the apps is actually pulling down the battery. I then have the options of (A) figuring out if there is a pref in that App to cause it to stop using battery when backgrounded, (B) Contact the application writer and let them know they have a poorly behaving App, and (C) (most important for me) - Reduce the number of applications I need to shut down to just the misbehaving ones.
Until then - count me in that category of users who believes (through experience) that the advice the Apple Geniuses are giving, that is, to terminate applications when you have an iPhone that is performing differently than when it is initially booted up, is good advice and is a real-world fix to this class of problem. (Though rebooting your iPhone accomplishes the same thing in my experience as well)