Oliver Haslam on November 1, 2019, 7:06 am

Complaints Pile Up About iOS 13.2 RAM Management Bug Aggressively Killing Background Apps

If you’re using iOS 13.2 or iPadOS 13.2 and find that your apps aren’t multitasking as much as they used to, you’re not alone.

We’ve experienced apps and games being closed in the background in plenty of occasions, with Safari also refreshing webpages more often than it once would; and half of the internet is having the same problem.

We’ve seen multiple internet reports of users finding that things aren’t quite as they should be. MacRumors forum member Rogifan is spot on with his assessment.

I was watching a video in YouTube on my iPhone 11 Pro. I pause the video to respond to a text message. I was in iMessage for less than one minute. When I returned to YouTube it reloaded the app and I lost the video I was watching. I noticed this a lot on my iPad Pro too. Apps and Safari tabs reloading a lot more frequently than they did in iOS 12. Very annoying.

Overcast developer, Marco Arment, also commented, pointing out that the issue seems to be much worse when users switch to the camera on an iPhone 11.

I’ve noticed this since the first 13.2 betas, and Overcast users keep reporting it as well: background apps seem to be getting killed MUCH more aggressively than before.

(Especially on the iPhone 11 if you use the camera, presumably because it needs so much RAM for processing.)

Do not mistake these to be some isolated events, we have Twitter, Reddit, and even Apple Support making noise about this aggressive RAM management.

The theory that the iPhone simply needs the RAM in order to handle the photography magic it’s carrying out makes tons of sense, but that doesn’t really help users. And given the fact that this didn’t happen prior to iOS 13.2, is it possible that the issue is related to Deep Fusion?

Probably not in all cases, especially given we’ve also experienced these issues on an iPad Pro. So maybe it’s just Apple’s infamous software quality biting us all once more.