iPad 101: Why Are My Apps Freezing?

People love their iPads. They take them everywhere and use them for everything. Many have grown somewhat dependent on them, so I can understand their concern when an app suddenly won’t work. For example, they open Safari but instead of being able to enter their search into Google, the screen is just gray. They can switch out of Safari back to the desktop, but when they tap Safari again, it’s still gray.

The iOS 4 update added a great new feature to Apple’s iPod, iPhone 4 and iPad devices: multitasking. Now you can run more than one application at a time, while previously when you closed an app, it stopped running (disconnecting you if it was an online app like Skype or Facebook).

Running under iOS 4, an app continues to run “in the background” when you tap the Home button to switch back to the desktop. The problem is that it isn’t obvious what apps are still running, nor is it made clear that this is even happening. New users of the iPad seem unaware that when they tap the Home button, the app they were just using is not “closed” but rather “minimized.”

On a Windows system, minimized applications are put into the Task bar, and on a Mac they are put into the Dock with a glowing light under them. On an iOS device such as the iPad, you don’t see these apps unless you tap the Home button twice. This brings up a scrollable bar on the bottom of the screen showing you the apps that are still running. All these apps take up memory to run, even though you don’t see them, and the more apps you have active, the less memory you have available for new apps to run.

When someone shows me that Safari is stuck, I check the list of active apps and two things happen: first, I find that they have 20 or so apps running, all of them consuming resources; and second, the customer exclaims, “I didn’t know you could do that!”

So how do you fix this? Once you have the list of active apps open, you can hold your finger on one of them until they start to jiggle. A red “-” sign appears in the upper left corner, which you can tap to close that app. This removes it from memory but DOES NOT delete the app itself. It is still on your desktop and can be relaunched later if you need it, but it will no longer be taking up memory that can now be used for other apps. Swipe back and forth to scroll through the list of active apps, closing off any that you aren’t using.

For example, there’s no reason to have Settings open all the time, but it’s fine to keep Mail active so you can get back to it quickly. Get into the habit of doing this once every few days to keep your device running efficiently. In the example I mentioned above, closing out Safari and a couple other apps “fixed” the problem; Safari relaunched and worked fine.

Perhaps iOS 5 will make it more obvious that this feature exists. It is one of the better points of the iPad and makes it so much more convenient and useful, but it can cause issues if you don’t keep an eye on it.