Now that I’ve been using iPadOS for a few months, I’m still trying to get used to some of the window management paradigms that are similar to macOS, but not quite the same. My biggest question is what is the difference between closing a window (app?), minimizing or hiding? On macOS the minimized window will go into a special place in the dock and remain visible. On iPadOS it disappears into the dock icon if it is in the dock or into the App Library icon if it isn’t. On macOS it is definitely still running, just tucked away, but I can’t tell if minimizing on iPadOS keeps the app running. I believe closing the app stops it from running, but not really sure since there is no Activity Monitor to verify what apps are running or not.
The other thing that exists is that you can hide an app. The only visible difference between hide and minimize is that minimizing the window animates into the dock, whereas hide disappears instantly without animation.
So does anyone have a good idea on what the difference is between these 3 features on iPadOS, Close, Minimize and Hide?
I’m sure you already know the following but it might be of use to others.
In general when minimized an app does not keep running. Some exceptions are music, podcasts, and journal. I’m not a developer, but the following explains some of the things iPadOS uses to determine how an app is treated when not being actively used better than I could.
I’m pretty sure that apps can do certain things in the background, like refresh their content periodically. But iOS can kill your app at anytime if it needs to, which of course is different from how macOS works.
So this is my source of confusion, they ported over three window management things from macOS: Close, Minimize and Hide (interesting that they DID NOT bring over Quit), but they didn’t explain how they are different in light of the way apps are handled on Mac vs iOS.
I’m guessing they just wanted to have as much parity with macOS as possible so people can work the way they want, but I bet that Close, Minimize and Hide do the exact same thing except for the animations that are slightly different for each.
As an aside, I have many friends and family members who periodically go to their phone and “quit” their apps in the app switcher. We all know this is basically a useless task, but many people are convinced that these apps keep running in the background and need to be cleaned up, something they probably learned from using a PC or Mac.
and goes on to explain how developers can do things that may allow their app to “Finish tasks in the background”. Watching it once did not make me an expert.
OK, I did some more experimentation with 3rd party apps. First I used Spotify to play music, when you either hide or minimize the apps, the music keeps playing in the background, I left it in the background for over 10 minutes, so I believe this is one of the APIs (playing audio) that allows iOS apps to run indefinitely in the background. If you close the window, the music stops.
With iA Writer, I have a specific note open and I select some text. When I hide or minimize the apps, showing the app again opens the same document with the same text selected. If I close the window, the next time I open iA Writer it starts with a new blank note.
So, I’m just going to conclude that hide/minimize are functionally equivalent. Close is the same as quitting the app on macOS. But not exactly because iA Writer also supports multiple windows. Closing 1 window doesn’t close any other windows. Spotify only has 1 window. So the behavior of Close depends on if it is a multi-window app or not.
