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Comment by AllenKids | Hacker News Reader

Technically I prefer Apple's approach. Android devices will always, sooner or later, reach a point that you have to manually kill off some apps.

But the app switch interface in iOS is less than desirable, it'll quickly clutter up even if you do not feel the lag, you'd wanna X everything off just so you don't have to scroll to the left 6 times to reach the app you intended for.

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The app switch list is designed as a convenient way to switch to the most-recently-used apps. If you have to scroll 6 times to find an app, then you're not switching to a MRU app, but a LRU app instead. In that case, finding the app icon in springboard will likely be faster. Clearing the list is a symptom of misusing the feature.

I'm always surprised when people do this - I don't see people compulsively clearing out their Recent Items. I wonder if the only people who do this are people who are used to closing apps on a computer to conserve resources.

Speak for yourself re Android - I never have to kill off apps in my Nexus One running 2.3.

I don't kill anything either.

What I meant by my original comment is that for me it doesn't work as I'd like. It may be an issue with the apps I use or iOS's way of doing multi-tasking.

I listen to 5by5 podcasts (atomic web browser) and follow the discussions on irc (Colloquy for iPad).

I someone posts a link on the irc and I follow it when I come back to colloquy I don't get any of the messages sent while I wasn't looking...

When I use the AndChat in my Nexus One I can happily go watch a lolcat and when I get back I can read all of the I can haz messages everyone sent while I was looking at the site.

That use case is the one I consider broken in iOS, maybe Apple doesn't care about people who still use irc or maybe it's Colloquy that's broken.

You could do something ala n900.

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