Archives » July 2010

I'd heard a few reports of a problem that has been showing up, but just this week have been able to reproduce it myself. The symptoms are that, under some circumstances, returning to the main screen does not display the menu - and the only way out is to kill the app - which in iOS4 is not just a case of pressing the home button (more on that later).

Having been able to reproduce it I have a better idea of what's causing it and am working on a fix.

In the meantime here's what I know:

The app is getting a signal to say that memory is low (this signal allows the app to free up any unnecessary resources. vConqr doesn't hold on to much that it can get rid of. It purges the sounds from memory, but that's it). When the low memory signal is sent the OS itself also tries to clear out things it thinks it can get by without.

Once this has happened, when you return to the main screen the menu no longer shows up. I haven't yet been able to work out why this is the case (all my hunches have been dead-ends so far) but I'm working on it.

The reason this didn't really show up before iOS4 is multi-tasking. Suspended apps still take up some memory, although iOS 4 does try to manage this for you. It seems that if you've had lots of apps "running" for a while the memory drops lower and lower. vConqr's memory requirements are not particularly high - I've never seen that memory signal outside of specific test cases before - but iOS4 pushes the limits a bit further. I saw this on my iPhone 4, which has twice the memory of the 3GS!

That said it should be handling it better, so I'm hoping to have a fix out very soon.

In the meantime, if you're an iOS 4 user and you have this problem and are not sure what to do - follow these steps:

• Press the home button once to come out of vConqr.
• Now double-click the home button to reveal the row of running apps at the bottom. vConqr should be on the left.
• Press and hold the vConqr icon until the red "delete" overlay icons appear
• Tap the delete icon for vConqr
• You might want to kill a few more apps while you are here, too - to free up some memory
• Restart vConqr

I can only apologise for the situation and will make it good as soon as possible.