Lose my Work In Progress on app switching

[dsjfdskfjlkdsf]

I’m iPad 6th owner and use both - Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer. It’s really good experience so I love it.

But sometimes when I switching to other applications (like Safari or Procreate) use them for long time than returning to my work in progress on Affinity Photo (or Designer) its opening main screen of application without my work. I enabled auto save for editing but looks like it does not work.

[Chris B]

Hey dsjfdskfjlkdsf,

So the app just opens up as if it is restarting from fresh or the work is missing from the document view? It sounds like it might be crashing.

Can you go to Settings > Privacy > Analytics > Analytics Data and see if there are any .ips files referencing Affinity Photo? If so, can you send me a copy please? 

[ovisan]

+1 happens to me too, the app is closed after a long period of inactivity, but the picture was saved usually. It depends if the app was closed before or after the autosave interval. It helps to lower the autosave interval, but ideally the app should not close by itself, rather run in background.

[dsjfdskfjlkdsf]

Yeah, set autosave to 30 seconds. Thank you

[Chris B]

That is odd. I don't use my iPad daily unless I'm checking a bug report or doing some testing. I will leave the app open on documents I'm checking for days at a time and haven't noticed it but I probably wasn't looking out for it.

There must be something slightly different you are doing to what I am. Is there a recipe or any specific apps you're switching to? Do you have crash reports in the location I mentioned above?

[dsjfdskfjlkdsf]

I made video how it looks like

 

[Chris B]

Thanks for the video. I'll give this a go now and see what happens. I'll definitely be speaking with dev about this

[Chris B]

I still cannot repo this. I opened up a bunch of design apps as I suspected the iPad might be running out of memory and killing the app. I will keep trying and look out for this now I have seen it in action. I'll also ask around the team. Thanks dsjfdskfjlkdsf

[dsjfdskfjlkdsf]

That’s mostly because just 2gb of RAM on my iPad.

[Chris B]

Ah okay, I have a 2017 Pro so I can ask some colleagues to try this. Thanks! 

[Chris B]

I've spoken with some colleagues and we have concluded that this is what happens when the iPad needs to free up memory. However, the autosave should absolutely be kicking in and saving work so it is not lost. I would reduce the default auto-save time from 300 seconds to something a lot less. The people I spoke to are the ones who tested this area of the app.

[dsjfdskfjlkdsf]

It was recorded with value of autosave - 30. That is the smallest possible value.

Possibly on unfocusing application to trigger save? In case this event can be fired.

[Chris B]

I was looking into this last night and came across this:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/31/20942043/apple-ios-13-iphone-11-pro-ram-memory-management-app-background-refresh

I'm not entirely convinced this is something we are doing now.

[dsjfdskfjlkdsf]

Yeah, but the question is how application deal with it. So saving before switching solve issue. Even if application will be force stopped you will save progress.

[Chris B]

True but it is easy to forget to save if you just want to quickly switch somewhere to do something and switch back. I guess that's what autosave is for but perhaps this is something Apple will improve in the future—I don't know! 

[dsjfdskfjlkdsf]

I mean automatically trigger autosave when application losing focus. Even if you for example set autosave to 5 minutes for example - in moment of switching (losing focus) trigger autosave right in a moment of unfocusing. Not manually press save button, the ability of what is also not bad.