What in the world did my phone just do? A sort of “half-respring” ?

[MrRom92]

Witnessed a very strange behavior I’ve never seen before in 16 years of using an iPhone.
I was sent a link to something on Dropbox, and I pressed the button that usually appears up top in safari so you can open whatever you’re looking at in-app instead of viewing it in the browser.

When I pressed the button to open the app, my phone immediately acted as if it crashed or initiated a re-spring. The little spinning wheel came up in the center of the screen, and my device was unresponsive to touch for the few seconds that it was displaying the spinning wheel.


We’ve all seen our devices crash or respring a million times before, nothing new there… but that’s where the similarities end.


After a few seconds of the spinning wheel, I was back into my Home Screen… NOT the Lock Screen. I was not prompted to unlock my phone again, use Face ID or enter a password, it was just already unlocked. Many of you will know this is not typical behavior of a device respring.
My phone was already plugged in to charge at the time of the crash, and when it came back from the spinning wheel the little “ding” went off as if it were plugged in again.
The several apps in that were minimized in my app switcher were all exactly how I had left them in the process of previously using them. None of them refreshed or reloaded upon opening them again. This is also not how the iPhone typically behaves after a respring or restart.

WTF did I just experience? It was like, some sort of “soft crash”. Never seen it before and I wouldn’t even know how to reproduce this behavior if I tried.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

Sounds like just the app crashed. I see this from time to time with Facebook Messenger app, but I don’t use Dropbox.

 

[MrRom92]

Sounds like just the app crashed. I see this from time to time with Facebook Messenger app, but I don’t use Dropbox.

App crashes usually just result in me being kicked back to the home screen - not a whole spinning wheel respring type thing!
This was somewhere in between an app crash and a full respring in terms of behavior. Super weird.

 

[eRondeau]

I witnessed the same sort of thing on Tuesday night with my iPhone 14 Pro. It was sitting on stand, fully charged, I wasn't touching it, hadn't used it recently... suddenly it did a "quick restart" as described. I thought it was weird but thought maybe Apple pushed-out a security tweak and it needed to do this to make it happen. Dunno. Agreed, I've never seen this before either.

 

[MrRom92]

I witnessed the same sort of thing on Tuesday night with my iPhone 14 Pro. It was sitting on stand, fully charged, I wasn't touching it, hadn't used it recently... suddenly it did a "quick restart" as described. I thought it was weird but thought maybe Apple pushed-out a security tweak and it needed to do this to make it happen. Dunno. Agreed, I've never seen this before either.

I’m curious which FW you were on and if it was possibly a beta?
I found the iOS 16 beta cycle to be buggy and had whole device crashes like that pretty frequently. But they were the full, “normal” style respring, where I’d eventually be kicked back to the lock screen as soon as the phone came back from the spinning wheel, not whatever weird thing I experienced this week.
It’s enough to keep me off the iOS 17 beta train!

 

[eRondeau]

I’m curious which FW you were on and if it was possibly a beta?
I found the iOS 16 beta cycle to be buggy and had whole device crashes like that pretty frequently. But they were the full, “normal” style respring, where I’d eventually be kicked back to the lock screen as soon as the phone came back from the spinning wheel, not whatever weird thing I experienced this week.
It’s enough to keep me off the iOS 17 beta train!

iPhone 14 Pro (non-Max) @ 512GB (400+GB free) running the current iOS 16.6. Nothing weird or wonky or beta. It's been flawless before and since.

 

[HDFan]

my phone immediately acted as if it crashed or initiated a re-spring.

What's a "re-spring"? Reboot?

 

[MrRom92]

What's a "re-spring"? Reboot?

Not really a full reboot. It’s when the device reloads springboard

See here for full explanation:

Respring - The iPhone Wiki

www.theiphonewiki.com

 

[HDFan]

See here for full explanation:

Respring - The iPhone Wiki

www.theiphonewiki.com

Are you sure that this is applies to IOS? Can't find any reference to this process on the developer site. Haven't found a way to list running IOS processes so couldn't check that way.

 

[MrRom92]

Are you sure that this is applies to IOS? Can't find any reference to this process on the developer site. Haven't found a way to list running IOS processes so couldn't check that way.

Yes, it’s on the iPhone wiki. The link even fully explains what Springboard is - this is very much an iOS thing, it’s the heart of the entire iOS experience.. It’s a very well known function of iOS, going back to whatever it was before they even called it iOS, iPhoneOS or what have you.

I’m surprised you’re totally unfamiliar with it.

One popular jailbreak tweak I probably had… maaaybe around 2009? Or 2010? Was a homescreen app icon “shortcut” that would invoke a respring.

 

[HDFan]

yes, it’s on the iPhone wiki. The link even fully explains what Springboard is - this is very much an iOS thing, it’s the heart of the entire iOS experience.. It’s a very well known function of iOS,

Yes, interesting, finally was able to see the process running on my iPhone in XCode and documentation about the process. It is not well known as most of the hits in MacRumors for the term are over 10 years old. Since "respring" is not a restart option how would one actually initiate it? There are some posts that say you kill the process but how would you do that?

Your description certainly sounds like a typical app crash where you are thrown back to the home screen. The crash might have taking down some other services which could explain the unusual behavior.

 

[MrRom92]

Yes, interesting, finally was able to see the process running on my iPhone in XCode and documentation about the process. It is not well known as most of the hits in MacRumors for the term are over 10 years old. Since "respring" is not a restart option how would one actually initiate it? There are some posts that say you kill the process but how would you do that?

Your description certainly sounds like a typical app crash where you are thrown back to the home screen. The crash might have taking down some other services which could explain the unusual behavior.

Like most under-the-hood iOS stuff it is not typically accessible to the end user but there was a time in the jailbreak world when this was a pretty common function of actually using the device. for example if installing or tweaking anything that directly affected the core iOS functionality, you would be prompted to respring.
Most typical iOS crashes also seem to trigger a normal respring as well, though the behavior I exhibited during this weird app crash was not something I’ve ever seen before or since. I could only call it a sort of “half respring” as I was not taken back to the Lock Screen, my phone remained unlocked and the states of my minimized apps were all retained.

 

[MrRom92]

I encountered this sort of “half-respring” behavior once again earlier tonight. This time I was on 17.4 b1. I don’t believe I was on a beta the last time it happened, I probably should’ve made note of the FW I was on, but I didn’t.

What triggered the “half-respring” this time - I was in either the photos app or Safari. I swiped on the homebar to switch into the YouTube app that was in the background. There was a video playing but on my TV, not my phone. The iPhone was just controlling it. Anyway, as soon as I swiped into YouTube (as I had already done probably a dozen times within that same hour alone) that’s when my phone gave me the spinning wheel.