Apps almost always reloading when switching apps

On my Fairphone 3, switching between apps almost always causes the app I’m switching to to reload, which is very annoying and makes some workflows that used to work fine with my Samsung Galaxy S7 impossible.

For example, I was just trying to print a label for a package using the DHL app. In the DHL app, I tapped on “Use address from address book”. The phone switched to contacts app and I selected the recipient – but when switching back the DHL app reloaded and I had to start over. So I entered the address manually. When I wanted to pay it showed me a WebView to enter my PayPal credentials, but again, when switching back the DHL app reloaded and the process started from scratch.

I realise that this could have been avoided if the DHL app wasn’t so badly written, but there are LOTS of apps that don’t deal with reloads gracefully. I encounter this several times a day.

As far as I understand it, when you leave apps/activities in Android the system caches their state so that the user can quickly switch back to them, but kills the app/deletes the cache when it thinks it has to free up memory. How aggressively it frees up memory is up to the manufacturer. Could it be that the threshold was set to some very multitasking-unfriendly value by the FP developers? I usually have at least 1 GB of free memory.

Have any of you had a similar experience? If my understanding is correct there is nothing the user can do about this, so I’ll make a ticket and hopefully get some response from the devs. But I’d love to hear from others who have encountered the same problem before.

(To get the obvious thing out of the way, “Don’t keep activities” is disabled in the developer options.)

Turns it I didn’t get the obvious thing out of the way. “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” I hadn’t. When I did, for the first time in about six weeks, the problem went away.

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Usually these reloads are caused by lack of available RAM. Next time you see the problem, please go into Settings > Memory to check whether any app was using an excessive amount of RAM.

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Thanks for your reply! I did that and there wasn’t any app with excessive RAM usage. Nothing above 100 MB if I recall correctly.

I get exactly the same. And yes, it’s very annoying when you have to make some online payment. Actually, more than annoying : it prevents me from doing some actions since when I switch to my baking app to validate a payment, the app from which I was making a purchase reloads completely and the purchase disappears.

I happen to have SmartPack installed for some reason, is there a way to tell the system to be less aggressive?

Hi a few issues worthy of note are

  • Do you use an SD card and is it formatted as Internal
  • How much memory is left on the SSD, excluding any internal SD, less than 6GB has been see to be an issue
  • As mentioned check the RAM usage maybe
  • Clear the cache from, any, every, especially any apps you use frequently.

I don’t use banking apps but I would wonder if they, as you put it, aggressively cut any other on-line activity.

This seems to be happening more frequently with Android 11. I just reboot the phone every two or three days and this issue (as well as some others) are taken care of.

Hi I wonder if it could be a ‘full’ memory issue. Maybe you could check the RAM before and after you restart?

Another possibility is that a particular app is interfering or overly demanding. The problem here is that although starting in Safe mode may confirm it was an app issue you would have to forego a lot of apps for 4 or 5 days or a week as you say it takes 2 or 3 days before it occurs.

Hi amoun,

  • Do you use an SD card and is it formatted as Internal

Yes, and no (I’m aware of this buggy feature)

  • How much memory is left on the SSD, excluding any internal SD, less than 6GB has been see to be an issue

Internal : Total: 64 GB / Used: 30 GB
External SD: Total: 62 GB / used 42 GB

  • As mentioned check the RAM usage maybe

Total: 3578 MB / Used: 2847 MB

  • Clear the cache from, any, every, especially any apps you use frequently.

Just tried, to no avail.

I don’t use banking apps but I would wonder if they, as you put it, aggressively cut any other on-line activity.

Well, banking app was an example. It happens with many other apps, when for example I have to switch to my 2FA app (Aegis), when I come back to the other app for the final stage of the authentication, the process is reset

Oh, and I forgot to mention: I deactivated the battery manager, and I set to un-battery-optimized many of these apps.

Another precision: I’m on LineageOS microg 18.1

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Hi Thanks for the info. I’ve never used anything but the default OS so unsure if that may be an issue.

700Mb RAM free at the moment and is it working OK?

Note your post was on a topic two years old and there have been a lot of OS updates, plus the OP may have been using the default FOS.

You may find it more helpful to start a new topic with a Lineage TAG

All the best

Thanks. I’ll try that.

OP (me :grin:) responded just before you did. The problem has gotten worse with A11, and I’ve never found any solution other than frequent reboots. It affects all apps as far as I can tell and looks very much like a OS-level memory leak to me. And of course I’m using the default OS, otherwise I’d have said so.

Edit: My wife has an FP3 as well and has never seen this problem, but she uses fewer apps and turns her phone on a lot less than I do.

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