If you’ve been trying out a lot of apps (free or paid) on your iPhone or iPod touch, then you would have most likely encountered an app or two that doesn’t behave as intended. It’s quite common to have some badly programmed apps to freeze or stop responding. Here’s when a tip like this falls in.
The iPhone OS, just like its big brother, Mac OS X, allows an application to be quit, forcefully – hence the name force quit. On the Mac OS X, you’ll simply press Command+Option+Escape key combinations. On the iPhone however, things seem to have gone into muddy waters, now that iPhone OS 3.0 as well as the iPhone 3G S was announced.
During the keynote presentation on Monday, June 8, 2009 – we were all told about a new function for the iPhone 3G S, and that is the Voice Control features. Activating Voice Control on the iPhone 3G S can be done by simply holding the Home button. As you can see, the Home button used to be the magic button that force quits an application when held for about 5 seconds. You’ll notice that when the application exits and the home screen reappears. Here’s a video I did some time back, demonstrating how to force quit the Safari application.
The function is now missing in iPhone OS 3.0 – or shall I say, enhanced. Force quitting an app in iPhone OS 3.0 can still be done, with an extra step.
If you are one of the lucky Lukes (or Leia, so to speak) to have iPhone OS 3.0 installed, try this the next time you want to force quit a misbehaving application. Hold the power button for a few seconds until you see the “slide to power off” prompt. Let go of the power button and hold the Home button until you see the application disappear and the home screen reappears.
Force quitting can be good avenues, not only to exit a misbehaving or frozen app. It’s also a good practice to quit background apps like Safari and Mail, which take up precious memory, especially before starting a game. Also, since most games save its state when you quit, you could actually force quit it if you want to prevent the game state from being saved. That’s what I did most of the time to somehow ‘cheat’ in certain games. Try it!
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October 9th, 2009 at 8:31 am
Yep! It works. Thanks!