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Apple iPad’s Crashing Secret

I’m typing this in Pages on my Apple iPad 1. I’ve been doing more and more work on this tablet and am fairly confident that I will get through this post without a crash.

What’s that you say? You thought Apple’s industry-leading tablet didn’t crash? It does. No, it’s nothing as inelegant as a blue screen of death. When a Windows-based PC crashes, I mean really goes down a wormhole, you get a blue screen and some details of why the system crashed.

My iPad crashes all the time. Actually, strike that. The iPad never has a full-scale crash, where the whole of iOS goes down and the tablet goes dark. Instead, iPad apps crash. Invariably, they crash by stopping whatever they were doing and throwing you back to the iPad home screen. I’ve experienced this on the game Infinity Blade–repeatedly– and on Twitter for iPad–repeatedly. In the former, it’s during game load and, sometimes right in the middle of an intense battle. On the latter, it’s often during an in-app browsing session, where I’ve followed a tweeted link. It also happens during Tweet composition. You can imagine my frustration.

When I tweeted about a recent crash, I did hear about others who’ve experienced some of the same issues. Searching online, I found forum entries and blog posts about numerous iPad crashes with a variety of apps.

As far as I can tell, iPad crashes have been around almost as long as the product has been on the market.  They often accompany iOS updates. Certainly, apps by themselves are sometimes the crash culprits– and most app makers deliver a steady stream of updates to address these instabilities.

However, I’ve come to realize that Apple shares part of the blame here, and I think it has to do with the way it handles multiple tasks and, possibly, memory management.

Multitasking was a welcome addition to the iOS feature set when it arrived with version 4 in 2010, but with it comes the sometimes unfortunate fact that apps you’ve been running at some point during the day are likely still running at the end of the day. Name a single app that has “quit” or “shut down” built into it. I’ve never seen one. Most people I know are like me and don’t even shut down and restart their iPads each day. They plug the tablet in to recharge. The iPad sleeps, but does not shut down or end all those running apps.

Yes, you can end any task/app at any time. All it takes is a double click of the home button, which brings up all running tasks in a horizontal pane. Holding your finger on any of the apps will make them all wiggle and show an “x” on the corner of each app. To kill an app/task/process, you click the “x”.

When you do this, you’ll notice something very interesting: All the crashed apps are still running.  At least in Windows, when an application crashes, it has the good sense to actually stop running. Yes, it may reboot itself, but you’ll see this happening. On the iPad, you think the app is dead, but it’s not. It’s still running. This seems like a mistake, and a great opportunity for a memory leak.

If Apple is going to run multiple tasks this way, then something has to change. You can’t have apps crashing, but still running, potentially improperly, in the background. A crashed app needs a full reboot, otherwise, it’s probably going to crash again when you try to run it again. This has certainly been my experience.

Also, if apps are going to continue running all day– or at least until you restart the iPad–then Apple needs to require an actual “quit” option for every single iPad app.

I would also suggest that Apple work on being more transparent about what’s happening during these mini-crashes. If it’s the apps’ fault, tell me so and suggest a remedy. If it’s the iPad’s fault, tell me what happened and what to do about it. I tried, for example, a system update (I’m now on 4.3.5). Sadly, it did not solve my crash problems.

This iPad crash issue is almost wide-spread-enough to be called a worrisome problem. Yet, unlike other controversies Apple has dealt with, like AntennaGate and dismissing certain apps from the AppStore, no one is making much of a fuss about this. Nor am I.  I still love my iPad and respectfully ask that Apple do something about the crashing. Right away. People won’t put up with this forever, you know.

–Lance Ulanoff

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