What I mentioned earlier: iPhone 2.0 not yet fully baked:
http://justanotheriphoneblog.com/wordpress/2008/07/17/iphone-20-software-whats-the-opposite-of-rock-solid/

nutsnbolts: an app that tells you what’s open? you mean something like… a task manager? that’s crazy talk! weren’t they laughing at the idea of the task manager in windows mobile back at wwdc, about how inelegant it was? noooo, there’s no need for anything like that.

as someone who has wrote a few Windows Mobile programs. The memory model is interesting. The SDk states that a well behaved app must always be prepared for termination by the OS.

Specifically, if the OS tells an APP “you need to close now cause i need your resources” the App must save it’s current state and close.

And.. well behave apps don’t just quit when there’s not enough memory. They’ll issue a request to the OS to say I need X MBytes of memory and the OS will go around shutting down apps in reverse usage order.

Unfortunately not a lot of people make well behaved apps

I always figured that the reason applications stayed open insteaed of closing when you click the X button was because that the cost of reading the code from ROM and placing it in executable RAM was much more expensive then just leaving the application idle in the background. Remember, the OS was designed back in the days when it costs a LOT of money for a measly 16MB of Flash Ram.

Just a quick update. I started having applications quit out on me. I kept trying and trying to launch it but it just wouldn’t launch. I waited approximately 10-15 minutes before trying again and everything started working again.

What does this prove? I don’t know really? I guess I’ll just keep trying to check this out to see if it will work.

I have had the same problem when opening up some larger web pages in Safari eg http://www.smh.com.au often crashes even though it’s one of the most popular web sites in Australia.

There is definitely an issue with memory management along the lines discussed above.

There is also at least one app that I have on my ipod that was not ready for prime time. Apple need to tighten up their approval process for sure.

I have read through a lot of documentation on what is suppose to be going on, but that does not mean it works that way in the real world. However, there are some basic things that are suppose to occur.

When you hit the home button, the application you are running is terminated. All memory allocated to that application is released and the application is no longer running. That is why it takes just as long to open the application the second or third time as it does the first. Just try opening the same application back to back.

While you are running the application, the programmer has to manage memory appropriately as in detailed in a number of technical documents. The documents repeating recommend to releasing objects and deallocating memory when not needed. As noted in a previous comment, the application is notified by the OS when memory usage is getting too high. The programmer is suppose to respond to this notification by releasing memory wherever possible. If the programmer ignores this notification, the application will be terminated by the OS when memory usage runs away. Unfortunately, if memory usage increases too fast, it might actually restart the iPhone. This has only happened to me in Safari. This does not surprise me since Safari is probably a memory intensive application. I mean, check the resource usage on your browser on the desktop. It is high.

Anyway, it is obvious from the documentation that memory management is a big concern, so it would not surprise me if this was causing most of the issues people are experiencing. At the same time, I have been experiencing more problems in Safari since updating to version 2.0. Thus, I would imagine there might be more going on in the background of 2.0 to handle the push features and other things included in the 2.0 firmware. Thus, memory problems might raise their head a little quicker than before.

Just another data point.

RandomiPhoneDeveloper: brilliant statement; spot on.

James, I know that’s what happens when you have multiple tabs open, but from your description, I got “open, open, open, open, crash” not “tab 1 loaded, tab 2 loaded, tab 3 loaded, try another tab, crash”. Those are different situations. Now I see you’re dealing with an overload issue, which should be addressed with better management. You should get a warning before you’re about to overload the memory, not a crash after you do so. That said, I don’t see where other apps factor into it.

It’s been all over the Net that this version of the iPhone OS was rushed and there are a bunch of fixes being made with an update soon to come. Not that that will fix *everything*. I suspect memory might be a persistent issue. I wonder how large the iPhone’s heap is? (Shades of PalmOS 5!!!)

Hey, I’ve had Safari go south on me when I’ve fondled it at an Apple Store. What makes it less than a terrible experience than when the 770 did that is that re-opening Safari puts me right back at the last page I was at. At most, it takes 2 seconds to resume what I was doing.

I think the iPhone is not for you, James. Better send it to me. Ha!

As someone who has been digging into iPhone programming for months, I can say fairly definitively that leaving an app (via a normal home button press) kills it (or at least should). The app gets a slew of messages to that effect, and people have been trying hard to get an app to run in the background despite Apple’s stated intentions of not allowing it.

The SDK is pretty clear that an app gets loaded, runs, then quits. It is up to the app to save state upon exit to make it appear like it was just suspended when it loads again. Some apps probably do a better job of that than others. I’ve never seen anything with my apps that makes me think I’m not starting from scratch every time. Now, how good the OS is at cleaning up after the app (particularly an ill-behaved one) is another question.

I suspect these issues have less to do with apps truly continuing to run, but more with somehow screwing up the system when they do run. That still ideally shouldn’t happen (especially given how Apple had all that gloom and doom talk about how they couldn’t have third party apps screw up the phone and thereby bring down the whole cell network and perhaps civilization as we know it). There are also low memory messages that apps are supposed to respond to but might not. The SDK hints that bad things can happen if they are ignored, however.

I know in one of my apps I’ve managed to somehow do something so that standard UI elements are drawn in the wrong places, in the wrong colors, or even upside down. It all happens randomly, and fairly infrequently. I’m sure I’m doing something wrong somewhere, but still it hardly seems that these apps are as sandboxed as they first appeared to be.

I think the real issue is that we have a lot of apps that were rushed into the store without adequate testing. The “final” beta SDK only came out a few days before the deadline for the App Store rollout submissions. I can’t see how anything but the simplest app could have been vetted properly. Apple also has let a few slip through that weren’t even using approved SDK frameworks, so their screening process is clearly imperfect. The better, more experienced, programmers probably had a good shot of doing it right, but the new players joining the iPhone app gold rush had (and probably still have) a lot of hard learning to do. Unfortunately, this means we early app adopters will probably have to deal with this mess in the meantime.

I don’t think that this is the cause of the problems. I’m currently developing an App for the iPhone and the SDK clearly states that only one application can run at the time and that your application will exit as soon as another app starts or the user receives a phone call. Once this happens the app gets notified by the system and is supposed the save the users data and the state of the app. This way it seems like it was running in the background because as soon as you start it again it should put you right back where you were. Memory leaks can only occur while your app runs (the app will also get notified when it runs low on memory). Once your app gets terminated the operating system is supposed to clean up (which it hopefully does).

I had some instability for sure but a full restore seems to have fixed it. I can’t really explain it but the iPhone in 2.0 with 3rd party apps is now very smooth. The one issue I have is that loading the SMS app takes a few more seconds than I remember.

I am also a convert from Windows mobile..woo hoo…

A few more weeks and I think I will be back with all the applications I had on Windows Mobile.

On a side note, here is another tip…hold down home and power button (screenshot taken) hehehe…anyway, most of you probably already knew that.

back to the topic, I do wish there was an app that tells you what is open. Now we will get somewhere.

Sumo, with multiple tabs that means the earlier pages are cached in memory no matter what is happening with the current one.

James, I’m only going by your examples. Your use of the present tense made it sound like you get kicked out when the the pages are loading, not when they’re done.

And in case you were wondering the answer is yes. Windows Mobile users are smirking collectively.