Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
Is it just me or are most apps just vanishing when I use them these days?
Since the last update or maybe one before, I’ve become highly infuriated whenever using my ipad because most apps I use daily are starting to just ‘disappear’ when I go to them to use. They go away. If I switch to another app instead, I note that it is still in the horizontal list of things I’m using, so it hasn’t crashed, it’s just gone away from view and left me with the ‘desktop’ instead. I can cmd-tab back to it and there it is. Then after a few more interactions with it, it’ll vanish again.
Safari is doing this. Keynote is doing this. eBay is doing this. Twitter is doing this. Over and over and over. I haven’t changed anything, it’s definitely the fault of the outside world.
Comments
Could be a memory (not storage) problem. Have you tried restarting the iPad, power off, not just sleep? That should recover any lost memory.
Yes
What iPad are you using. Did you try a hard reset if you have a newer iPad: volume up, volume down, hold the power button until you get the Apple logo?
It’s an A1701, but I doubt it’s anything to do with my particular ipad or this generation of iPads, I’m sure it’s something going on with all iPads everywhere due to something that’s happening in the outside world such as a new system that causes this to happen.
Sorry, but that's not correct. I have iPadOS 14.4 on iPad 6, all apps current updates, and this never happens to me, despite several hours of daily use. Now, I am aware of some problems in iPadOS 14. For example, AppStore search grabs 100s of MB of memory for no reason; I don't do that any more. You mentioned Keynote, which I don't use; Apple may have corrupted it in some way. But there's no generic flaw that affects iPads everywhere.
I still suspect that one of your apps may have a memory problem. You could try looking in the Logs for jetsam logs. If there are more than a few, and if the times are correlated with the event times, that would point the finger. The "largestProcess" is listed near the top; it might be the offender.
A crashed app can still show up in the apps that are loaded. When you bring them back up from the load screen, they'll quitly relaunch and try to restore their state. I have one app that I have to use that crashes constantly in spends much of its time in this zombie state.
When developing, if I force quite an app from the debugger, it'll still show in the list of running apps, but it is definitely gone because I've killed it.
If this is happening to lots of apps, I'd suspect a corrupted OS or possibly an issue with bad RAM.
Also, check to see if it is a particular app or sequence of app launches that is causing the issue. Maybe some app has figured out a way to corrupt RAM that it shouldn't have access to.
Oh well that blows my theory. I was working on a 100% of my sample, but you’ve just widened that sample.
Logs?
Logs: Settings–>Privacy–>Analytics & Improvements–>Analytics Data
Look for ones named "JetsamEvent". The rest of the filename is the timestamp. You can view them right there in Settings. When one is opened, you can Share it to other apps that handle text files (which they are despite the .ips extension). Viewing (aside from the beginning) is fairly tedious, since they're a random listing of all processes at that time. The format is basically Json, i.e. name/value pairs, with groups (objects or lists) in {}. It'd be useful to see the size (rpages) of that largestProcess, but you'd need to share it to an editor that can search the file. I use GoodReader, which has an excellent search function. Of course, you could copy it to a computer, and access its resources.