Can anyone explain my iPad mini's extraordinary behaviour?

(I mean “extraordinary” in the literal sense here; this question is about suspending apps, so it’s not like my mini is levitating or something.)

A notorious inconvenience with Obsidian on iOS and iPadOS is that it can be slow to launch a big vault with lots of plugins after the app has been quit or suspended. Thus, it would be great if iOS and iPadOS would not be so paternalistic about suspending Obsidian after I’ve not used it for ~15 minutes.

Yet, for some reason, my iPad mini has never — ever! — suspended Obsidian. Whenever I launch the app, it restores instantly and perfectly back to wherever I’d last left off.

I have 21 apps open in the background on the mini. I probably don’t have many more than that even installed — I really only use this device for reading in Obsidian and Books, plus the occasional browsing (Arc, for now). Sometimes I’ll check Home, put on a YouTube video, or use Music.

Compare this with my M4 iPad Pro 13" and my iPhone 15 Pro Max. The iPhone and the mini should have identical computing hardware, albeit the iPhone has far more apps installed and used. Meanwhile, my iPad Pro 13" should be much more powerful and its setup is similar to the mini. Yet both suspend apps as often as they can.

Any guesses as to why the mini doesn’t suspend apps? And more importantly, how I might get my other devices to behave the same way?

Is your Background App Refresh setting the same on all devices?

3 Likes

Good question. Obsidian doesn’t support Background App Refresh so it’s not on the list. Nonetheless, the settings on each device are the same.