When did App Cleaning start?

[Moccasin]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

I have noticed since upgrading to iOS 5 that every now and again, an App will show "Cleaning" below the icon rather than the app name.

What triggers this and was this a feature of iOS 5? Is it a way of stopping the whole device crashing?

Occasionally, an app will behave as if it has been reinstalled but usually will have re-started.

Apologies if this has been asked before.

 

[eagandale4114]

Pics please.

 

[miamialley]

Yeah, I noticed this the other day. I thnk it was the Facebook app on my iPhone. Weird.

 

[Small White Car]

This is a good overview:

http://www.marco.org/2011/10/13/ios5-caches-cleaning

He's writing that from the perspective of a developer who is not happy with the new system because it's screwed up his app.

He's not arguing against cleaning, though. He's merely explaining how it needs to change in order to work with apps like his. I'm fairly certain Apple will be taking these kinds of suggestions into account in future updates, but we'll just have to wait and see.

 

[BlaqkAudio]

This is a good overview:

http://www.marco.org/2011/10/13/ios5-caches-cleaning

He's writing that from the perspective of a developer who is not happy with the new system because it's screwed up his app.

He's not arguing against cleaning, though. He's merely explaining how it needs to change in order to work with apps like his. I'm fairly certain Apple will be taking these kinds of suggestions into account in future updates, but we'll just have to wait and see.

App cleaning was supposed to have been "fixed" in 5.0.1, although I forgot what exactly they changed.

 

[Moccasin]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Thanks for the link. Seems I need to clear my usage a bit as it seems to be a function of limited memory.

Certainly my iPhone 4 seems to crash less with ios 5, so this could be a reason.

 

[mkrishnan]

This is a good overview:

http://www.marco.org/2011/10/13/ios5-caches-cleaning

Wow, thanks for posting that. I had never heard of this. I have apps that store a large amount of data on-iPhone (MyMedia & Kindle in particular... I don't have the new version of Navigon because I didn't want to re-download all the map data, but I would assume it falls in this category also). I've never seen any of these apps get cleaned (does this only happen if iCloud sync is on?), but I know it would be a serious issue if their data were deleted as housekeeping by iOS. How are all the majors like Kindle and Navigon handling this (you'd think if they had issues, there would be a lot more noise about this)?

 

[Small White Car]

Ok, based on new information in this thread I did this google search:

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Marco,+5.0.1+cleaning&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

While I don't see an exact description of WHAT changed in 5.0.1, the links all seem to indicate that Apple did something that helped. So perhaps this issue is solved. Or maybe not...I can't tell for sure.

I'd love for Marco to do a more in-depth follow up post. He mentioned that the 5.0.1 beta had something related to this, but it was just a mention. I don't know the details.

 

[mkrishnan]

I'd love for Marco to do a more in-depth follow up post. He mentioned that the 5.0.1 beta had something related to this, but it was just a mention. I don't know the details.

Per this:

http://www.tipb.com/2011/11/04/apple-ads-dontpurge-dontbackup-file-store-ios-5/

I think what it was is that with 5.0.1, they added a folder for files that are not synced but should not be purged by the system (but I'm still surprised I never knew about this issue between the release of 5.0 and 5.0.1).