Manual stopping of the aprs.fi iPhone app is unnecessary

Quite often someone says the aprs.fi app is starting up with the map showing Helsinki instead of the previous map view and position, and requests for an improvement to the app to save the last location on the map. Well, it turns out that the app certainly does save the last location, and in fact a fairly complete state of many other views, every time the app leaves the screen. It is saved to a state restoration file. It will return to that view, based on the restoration file, even if the operating system needs to free up memory for other apps and removes the aprs.fi app from memory. Even after the whole iPhone is rebooted.

I invite you to make a quick test:

1. Position to your location (using the GPS centering button in the low right corner), or any other preferred position other than Helsinki.
   
   
2. Leave the app: Go to home screen by pressing the home button or swiping up on a device without a home button. Do not go to the most-recently-used apps list and swipe the aprs.fi app up to manually kill it. Just don't.
   
   When the app goes out of view the app saves the current view and state to a small state restoration file. Within some 5 to 20 seconds iOS will completely suspend the app from running, unless beaconing is enabled or the software TNC is running and streaming audio. It will not run in background, unless there is a necessary background task, and the iOS operating system will not allow it to execute on the CPU.
   
   iOS also takes a screen shot from the app on the screen at this point, and saves it on persistent storage along with the restoration file (SSD/flash memory).
   
   
3. Turn off the power of the iPhone (Settings -> General -> Shut down). Just to prove the point. This will, for sure, terminate all apps and remove them from memory.
   
   
4. Turn on phone, and open up the aprs.fi app. At this point it is started again, and it reads the state restoration file.
   
   
5. Observe the app magically returning to your last view. It can even return to most other views than map view after a complete reboot cycle. If you were tracking stations, it will continue to track the same stations at their current locations. If you were at the Help screen before the reboot, it'll go back to Help!
   
   To make the "cold start" of the app look faster, iOS will initially display the screen shot of the app it took in step 2, until the app is actually running and producing stuff on the screen. Even after a reboot, it looks very much like the app would have been running all the time. Sufficiently advanced technology looking like magic, again.
   
   
6. If you manually terminate the app by swiping it up from the recent apps list, iOS will delete the state restoration file and the screen shot, so that the next startup of the app will happen from a clean state. It will not be able to go back to the previous view. On the next cold start the app will show a splash screen with the aprs.fi logo instead of the screen shot.

Quite a few people have a habit of killing apps and removing the state files by swiping them up from the recent apps list. This is probably because the misconception that those apps would be running on the CPU and consuming memory, and killing them would free up resources and save energy. This would be quite logical and is rooted in the history of traditional computers. The Internet has a thousand sites describing this procedure and claiming it'd do something good. Unfortunately not everything written on the Internet is true.

In fact the iPhone/iPad iOS operating system is already doing all that needs to be done! When an app goes out of view, iOS normally suspends all execution of the app after about 5 seconds. The suspended app will remain in RAM memory, though, until that memory is needed for something else. If there's enough memory and you return to that app soon without using a lot of memory in other apps, iOS can simply wake the app up from memory and it will resume running very quickly. It may remain suspended in memory for a very long time if you use it frequently without using a lot of memory in other apps. The power usage of that memory is very small, and the amount of power used does not change based on how much stuff is currently stored.

When the active app currently running in foreground (i.e. displayed on screen) needs more memory and there isn't any memory available, iOS will quietly free up memory by fully terminating some of the other apps which are currently suspended. When a terminated app is started again, it will need to initialise itself and read all resource files from the permanent flash storage. All of this takes much more CPU, wall-clock time and electrical energy than waking up from RAM memory.

If apps are unnecessarily terminated manually, they will use more energy when they are used again, as opposed to the situation where they are simply woken up from suspended state.

The attached image is from the Apple developer documentation. The app transitions through the Inactive states very quickly when moving between the Active state and other states.

That said, some apps can also run in the background, but only while performing one of a few specific tasks: playing music, VoIP calls (skype, whatsapp calls, other telephony), receiving GPS location updates for navigation, and a few other things. Each of these Background Modes need to be specifically permitted by an Apple employee during the app review process. For example, an app without actual user-visible mapping, navigation or location-related features are not allowed not obtain GPS positions in the background.

The aprs.fi app plays and records audio in the background when the software DSP modem is running. A red "recording" symbol will show up in the top of the screen whenever this happens in the background, and tapping that symbol will pop up the app doing it.

The aprs.fi app can also receive GPS location updates when beaconing is enabled and the app is given permission to obtain location data in the background. The "Allow location access" setting in iOS Privacy settings must be set to "Always". "While Using the App" setting only gives location data when the application is in the Active state, i.e. in the foreground, displayed on the screen. The app will naturally only request and receive location updates in the background when beaconing is enabled - requesting the frequent location updates uses a significant amount of energy since it powers up the GPS circuitry. The battery drains much faster if beaconing is enabled! If the software modem is not running, and beaconing is off, the app will be properly suspended within seconds after it leaves the screen.

After saying all of this: There are a few cases where manual termination of the app may be necessary. If the state restoration file is corrupted, and the app crashes on startup while reading it, manual termination will delete the file and work around the issue.

Once I had a bug in the app, where the user could navigate to a view which had no working "go back" button, and no way to switch tabs. The app was running but the user was stuck there on that single screen. To make things worse, state restoration worked perfectly, so even after a full iPhone reboot the user would be automatically brought back to this view! Again, a manual termination of the app removed the state restoration file and the app would again start up in the map view, and all was fine as long as the user did not go to that same view again.

A buggy app could accidentally also continue recording audio, or receiving GPS location coordinates, after it no longer needs them. But iOS will tell you if they do this, and you can then terminate them if necessary.

A former Apple Genius Bar technician, Scotty Loveless, wrote:

"By closing the app, you take the app out of the phone's RAM . While you think this may be what you want to do, it's not. When you open that same app again the next time you need it, your device has to load it back into memory all over again. All of that loading and unloading puts more stress on your device than just leaving it alone. Plus, iOS closes apps automatically as it needs more memory, so you're doing something your device is already doing for you. You are meant to be the user of your device, not the janitor.

The truth is, those apps in your multitasking menu are not running in the background at all: iOS freezes them where you last left the app so that it's ready to go if you go back. Unless you have enabled Background App Refresh, your apps are not allowed to run in the background unless they are playing music, using location services, recording audio, or the sneakiest of them all: checking for incoming VOIP calls , like Skype. All of these exceptions, besides the latter, will put an icon next to your battery icon to alert you it is running in the background."

In 2016, an iPhone user decided to email Apple CEO, Tim Cook, and ask whether manual killing of apps would extend battery life. The reply came from Apple's senior VP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi:

The recommendation of Kendall Baker is golden:

"As for the multitasking menu, think of that as a “Recently Used” section, as opposed to a “Currently Open” one."