GPS apps are notorious battery hogs.
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I just experienced something that has a direct bearing on this discussion but which I can’t remember seeing before.
I was listening to a podcast, and via the control panel on my phone, I got the sound to play through a speaker (named ‘Kitchen’) connected via AirPlay. I then stopped the podcast, and (force of habit), did force-quit on the podcast app. A bit later, I wanted to play a movie that was sent to me via WhatsApp, and I wanted the sound to come from the Kitchen speaker. I checked the control panel, and ‘Kitchen’ was still connected. The panel also showed the podcast details with a ‘play’ button.
When I started the movie, the sound didn’t go to the Kitchen speaker, but to my phone! The control panel still shows the Kitchen speaker is connected.
So far I have not understood how to force the movie to use the Kitchen speaker. My guess is that if I could remove all trace of the podcast, the thing would work. Can anyone suggest what’s happening and how to correct this apparent anomaly?
I don’t know how AirPlay survives different apps, especially after a delay in time between uses, (and mostly because I rarely use it), but what happens if you don’t force-quit the podcast app? (This really is a habit you should break in my opinion.)
I hate it when my apps get relaunched because I was taking pictures with Camera app in my 12 mini (iOS v17.5.1). :(
I don’t think this has anything to do with whether or not you could ‘quit’ the podcast app, I think it’s more likely to be an issue with WhatsApp. You could test this by trying to play something with the Music app after pausing a podcast – Music will use the speaker you’ve selected without issue. In fact you don’t even need to pause the podcast first, and definitely don’t need to force quit the app (I have had one app take over audio on an external speaker from another app many times).
According to this site, WhatsApp doesn’t support AirPlay so maybe that’s the issue you encountered?
I’m with @ddmiller, I would try to stop force quitting things as it’s not the model iOS works with.
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I think that’s looking at it backward. You need to switch whatever app is playing the movie to use the remote speaker. If, as @jzw says, it’s WhatsApp and you’re using AirPlay, that would explain it.
Well, it seems that I have yet again come unstuck because I have an inaccurate model of the way apps work. I saw the video as coming from WhatsApp in exactly the same way as a similar file might be sent via Mail as an attachment. When I try to play the video, I don’t think of WhatsApp as being the agent that controls the video player, just an agent that hands over the file: email attachments are normally opened by an appropriate app, not Mail itself, so why not the same with WhatsApp?
I will do a couple of experiments and report back (and as an aside I will try not to use force-quit, even though it’s very tempting when there are a lot of applications to be seen when you want to switch apps - it seems so much tidier to make the unused ones disappear).
As another aside, the article on WhatsApp and AirPlay (thanks, jzw) seems to be to be about the idea of seeing on the screen of your TV or whatever, the same screen as you see when chatting on WhatsApp. That’s not what I’m trying to do.
Apple has said that there’s no point - the system will dynamically stop applications (and/or their scenes), and force-quitting will remove the app’s data from memory, potentially forcing it to reload data at the next launch, when it might not actually be necessary.
In general, I don’t force-quit apps unless I’m experiencing a problem (e.g. an app that’s hung or is consuming too much CPU power, and is therefore making the phone hot.)
See also Apple’s support page about restarting apps:
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Elsewhere in TB Talk, you can see that several people have made this point to me (no need to force-quit in normal circumstances), and I accept it in general, but I do have nagging doubts, even if they’re only cosmetic. For example, I normally switch apps by getting the phone’s screen in the configuration that prepares for force-quit (slide up to see the collection of apps which have been launched in the phone and not force-quit). Sometimes I see 15 or so such apps looking at me, and I think how untidy this is, and how many of them represent tasks which I’ve stopped working on. It seems natural to sweep them away, just as it seems natural to empty the dishwasher into the crockery cupboard. But I should resist, I suppose.
(While talking about things that Apple have re-modelled, I should mention the deprecation of ‘Save As…’ in favour of ‘Rename’ and automatic save on the Mac. There are unintended consequences of this model IMO. Obviously a massive digression.)
I think the key is to not think of it as a list of apps that are running, like the list you get on macOS if you select “Force Quit” from the Apple menu.
Instead, think of it as a history of apps that you were previously using, which may or may not be running at the time you browse the list. Sort of like the “Recent Items” item on the macOS Apple menu.
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Apple calls that screen the “App Switcher”. It’s doing just what it’s designed to do. Most of the time you want to quickly switch to a very recently used app, and launching an app you haven’t used for a while is easier in other ways (home screen icon, search from the home screen, or the furthest-right Home Screen, the App Library), but it’s also nice to know that you can use the app switcher if you like.
Yes, you can use the app switcher to force-close an app, but that’s not its main purpose. [edit] Well, it’s not what Apple intends to be its main purpose.