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We're seeing a strange situation on our iOS app that is impacting our user experience.

When a user background's the app (by pressing the Home button), we can clearly see the app entering the background. When the user then force-closes the app (by double-tappinging the Home button and sliding-up on the app), the app terminates normally. When the app is then re-opened, it follows the normal iOS start-up sequencing.

However, if the user double-taps the Home button while the app is running (resigning the app from active, but not sending it to background) and then force-closes the app (by sliding-up on the app), we're seeing the app terminate (the process gets killed), but then the app immediately re-starts in the background (with a new pid). The app is not designed to start-up or run in the background, and this is causing UX issues.

The app has no entitlements to run in the background, although we do have a couple of third-party libraries that have tasks that wind-down when the app enters the background.

I suspect the issue is a result of the app being force-closed from a non-active state rather than a background-state. If the app enters the background first, the third-party tasks are getting a chance to complete. If the app is force-closed from the non-active state, the tasks never get a change to complete in the background, so iOS is restarting the app in background to give those tasks a change to finish. It's unclear, however, if this is correct behavior.

-Stix

Michael Lee
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1 Answers1

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I'm kinda thinking the questions were self-evident, but if not:

  1. Is this correct behavior for iOS? Should iOS be restarting the app in the background when the user force-closes the app w/o putting it into background?

  2. If this is correct behavior, what can cause this to occur? Is it possible some third-party framework - still running a background task that hasn't completed - is the culprit?

  3. The force-close works fine if the app is put into background first (giving background tasks the ability to complete/expire). Is there anyway to force it into background when force-closing the app while it's in a non-active state?

Stix
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