IOS app reloads on iPad, losing current story

Something happens in the iOS app on my iPad Pro that is driving me crazy. I use the app in landscape mode. I tap All Stories and use the hardware keyboard N key to step through the stories. Frequently, while reading something, I want to share it with someone in messenger, facebook, whatever. I toggle out to messenger to discuss it with someone. Or maybe what I’m reading makes me want to switch to safari real quick to research something. Whatever it is, if I toggle into another app, unless I’m very quickly toggled back to the newsblur app, when I switch back it reloads. It switches back to the main screen that shows the list of channels rather than stories. What I was reading is gone with the wind. If I’m lucky and I remember what channel it was, I might be able to find it again, but that can be a big if on some things.

I wish it would just show me whatever I was last looking at until I switch back to the other view on purpose. This behavior almost seems like a mini crash.

I have no idea if this is a bug report or a feature request, but thanks for considering it regardless.

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That is annoying. I’m not sure why the app is killed in the background but it is likely due to an older iPad. Which iPad do you have?

Also, to get around this, next time it happens scroll to the bottom of the feed list and use the Read Stories feed. Your last story will be on top. I’ve used this for various reasons that are similar, but having the app get killed out from underneath me when moving back and forth really only happens on older iPads.

I used to have a feature that would return you to your scroll position, but I found that it was slow and unreliable. I can resurrect that if people want, but I don’t think NewsBlur gets used for much long-form reading where you return to an article over time, so I abandoned it.

Read Stories! I never noticed that. That will pretty much solve this for me. Thank you! I guess this iPad is getting a little old. It’s a 12.9 inch pro made in 2015 if I recall correctly.

No, that shouldn’t be considered old. Especially the pro model, which has double the RAM. Why it’s killing NewsBlur I don’t know. Do you possibly have hundreds or over a thousand feeds? That could potentially do it.

I was frequently having this problem.  It looked to me like iOS was frequently clearing up any running apps.  I wondered that it was because I was low on storage (eg. < 200MiB), so iOS was trying to free more storage by wiping caches.  I’ve just upgraded to an iPhone 7 Plus 32 GiB and attributed the fact that this problem has gone away, and many apps are now kept live, to the fact that I’ve now got coming on for 16GiB available unused.

If NewsBlur could remember what I was looking at previously and reopen to there it would have made me happy (and still would occasionally when the app crashes).

I have 852 feeds.

This happens to me too. I have an original iPad Pro, purchased in November, 2015. Is that considered “old”? It’s got plenty of memory. I have only 60 feeds. I didn’t realize that it was killing NewsBlur when I switched to a different app, then back again. I thought NB was just refreshing unnecessarily. Is there some way to fix this? Thanks.

It’s not an ‘always’ thing and has to do with exactly *what* you are doing in other app(s) that causes iOS to run out of memory to the point it kills NewsBlur. I use a 10.5ʺ iPad Pro which has the same amount of memory (RAM, not flash) as yours — although a lower resolution screen — and seldom notice NewsBlur being killed when I do other things.

The only way to solve this for good would be to implement full state restoration in the NewsBlur iOS app (meaning every single view would need to understand how to save and restore its state), which given Read Stories exists as above, seems to be a lot of tedious and error-prone work for limited benefit. Of course NewsBlur iOS is open source so if anyone else feels like they need to scratch this particular itch, it’s certainly doable :slight_smile:

Came here to mention this issue. I’ve been using my iPad a bit more lately with NB, so I guess I didn’t really noticed before. I have a first gen 10.5” iPad Pro (a1709). Figured it might be the background app refresh setting, but having that turned on hasn’t fixed it. Additionally, it’s sporadic and I haven’t been able to figure out the trigger yet.

I have this problem, too. On both iPad and iPhone. Since the big update back in October. I finally switched to Fiery Feeds as my iOS client and stopped using the Newsblur app.

This is still a problem for me. I’ve updated the iPad, so I’m pretty sure it’s not a hardware issue. I have a current version iPad Pro right now. Still with this really irritating issue. App seems to relaunch if you toggle out of it for more than a few seconds.

Ok, I wrote a high priority ticket to see about addressing the memory issues that are causing the app to quit. Hopefully we’re get it fixed for a big update coming out soon.

You can follow the issue here:

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