Crash when quick switching between apps

[Oakwine]

My use case is that I often take a photo of a handwritten form, and later copy the information into TapForms. So, I am quickswitching between the Photos app and TapForms. Each time I switch back to TapForms, I see the TF icon in the center, and it takes longer and longer to show the form I was working on. Eventually, TF will crash.

I was originally seeing this issue on an iPhone XS and iOS 14.x. I have just upgraded to an iPhone 13 Pro and iOS 15, and am still seeing this issue. There should be plenty of RAM available on the iPhone 13 Pro. I do not have any password or security set in TF itself.

That is everything I can think of, I’m happy to answer any further questions.

[Sam Moffatt]

I’ve not seen this with Tap Forms, but a number of applications seem to be terminated by the operating system after switching over to the Photos app. The Photos app seems to put enough pressure on the system to cause many other apps to be terminated. Tap Forms appears to crash because I think it’s trying to do stuff on a background thread that gets killed before it finishes the transaction, it’s been a while since I looked into the random crash when TF is evicted.

[Oakwine]

I found another large app (Disney Emoji Blitz) that causes Tap Forms to crash the same way. But switching between Photos and Disney Emoji Blitz does not cause any issues between the two apps. I still think there is something awry in Tap Forms.

[Brendan]

Hi Oakwine,

Can you please try running the Compact Database function to see if that helps a bit with this issue? It shouldn’t be a memory issue with that new an iPhone. You could also try setting the Photo size to something a bit smaller than Original. That’ll use less memory for the photos.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Oakwine]

Thanks Brendan!

I have no photos in my database.

I backed it up (4.5 MB), then “compacted” it from 15.8 MB to 22.9 MB; for some reason, compacting it increased the size.

Compacting the DB did not help, it still crashes the same way.

The DB is a simple 2 table setup, one parent (people, 621 records) and one child (appointments, 1057 records). There is a Note field on each table. There are also some same-record calculations for each table, and one on the parent table that calculates an average from the child table records.

[Brendan]

The compact function will appear to make it larger right after sometimes, but when you close and re-open the document, you’ll see the true size of it again.

It could still be the Photos app eventually causing the system to run out of memory and thus terminating Tap Forms. Or it could be Tap Forms.

But I’ve just tested out what you described and yes, I’m seeing that behaviour now too. And not only with the Photos app and Tap Forms. I tried it with the Notes app and the same thing happened.

I’ll look into it. Must be a memory leak causing this.

Thanks for reporting this issue.

Brendan

[Brendan]

I discovered the source of the crash. It turns out I was registering for application backgrounded notifications too many times. Each time you switched to another app and back to Tap Forms, a new registration was created instead of just a single registration for the entirety of the application. So they were just building up and up and consuming resources. Oops!

I’m sending a new build to Apple now.

Thanks for reporting this issue.

[Oakwine]

Thanks for finding the issue! I live my life as a edge case.

[Author]

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