The App Switcher gives you a place to manage all the different apps you’ve opened recently on your iPhone or iPad. You can move between recently-used apps or remove them from system memory by force-quitting them; that’s about it.
The App Switcher gives you a place to manage all the different apps you’ve opened recently on your iPhone or iPad. You can move between recently-used apps or remove them from system memory by force-quitting them; that’s about it.
The App Switcher on an ordinary iPhone or iPad contains all the user’s recently-used apps. They’re in a state of suspension until re-opened, allowing the system to more efficiently load and prepare the app for the end user. But have you ever picked up your phone a day later and still saw a mess of apps in your App Switcher that you wish wasn’t there?
If you like how fluid and capable that multitasking feels on the iPad, then you probably wish your iPhone’s multitasking capabilities were up to par. Sadly, they aren’t; but with a new and free jailbreak tweak called medousa by uz.ra, you can get the multitasking experience that you’ve been hoping for on your iPhone.
If you’re one of those people that likes to clear out your App Switcher when you’re finished using your iPhone despite several advisories suggesting that you shouldn’t, then you might be excited to learn that iOS developer ichitaso has updated their popular KillBackground13 jailbreak tweak support the latest rootless jailbreaks on iOS & iPadOS 15 and 16.
For folks who like having more color at their fingertips when interacting with their iPhone’s user interface, the popular SwitchShades jailbreak tweak by iOS developer AnthoPak has been updated this week to support rootless iOS 15 and 16 jailbreaks such as Dopamine and palera1n.
For the most part, you shouldn’t be force-closing apps from your App Switcher unless you’re having a problem with them because suspending apps there is your iPhone’s way of optimizing performance upon the next time you go to use those apps.
The iPhone’s App Switcher has always been somewhat blasé, lacking features and UI capabilities that we didn’t even know we wanted or needed until the jailbreak community started making us keenly aware of them.
iOS developer Ginsu is out this weekend with another slick jailbreak tweak release in the form of KillControl, a free add-on that lets users control their iPhone’s App Switcher behavior with respect to forcefully quitting recently used apps.
iPhone users have long decried the platform’s multitasking experience, especially compared with side-by-side apps on the iPad or windowed apps on desktop computers. The App Switcher just doesn’t cut it for users who want to get stuff done as quickly as possible.
Anyone that does even the smallest amount of multitasking on their iPhone should be avidly familiar with the App Switcher. That’s because it’s the primary way to move from one app to another without visiting the Home Screen.
The App Switcher is, at least in my opinion, one of the most underwhelming interfaces on the iPhone. The full-screen card switcher interface makes such poor use of the expansive screen real estate that it’s no surprise we see so many jailbreak tweaks attempting to fix this.
The latest of such tweaks is one called Vaon by iOS developer atar13, which not only converts the App Switcher from a card-based interface to a grid-based one, but also adds an iOS 14-style battery widget to the bottom.
Despite the fact that force-closing all the apps in your App Switcher isn’t the best of practices on the iOS or iPadOS platform, it’s still something that I continue to see people do time and time again.
Perhaps the most painful part of it all is watching when someone accidentally force-closes an app that they didn’t intend to – usually their most recently-used app which they were trying to improve the performance of by freeing up system memory in the process of force-closing all their other apps.