Question

…and this broken state persisting until a device restart, since a naive attempt to restart an app would not work. Many users are not savvy enough to know how to terminate services/backgrounded apps. If the user can’t (or doesn’t ‘need to’) close apps, then what about restarting apps which have gone wrong? ( It can happen 🙂 ) If my app goes wrong on someone’s phone and they cannot easily restart the app without restarting the phone, that seems like a problem. I am aware that apps and services can be terminated by navigating system menus or double tapping the home button etc. but – many users are not aware of these features. For this reason I am thinking of adding an explicit close button to my app which will kill everything to the best of my ability, such that on a subsequent launch the program runs from the beginning again. I realise this is not the ‘recommended’ approach. Thoughts?

Answer 1

Thoughts?

Don’t do it. Instead you should put a FAQ entry on your apps website that says.

Q: My app does not run anymore. HELP!

A: First you should try to restart the app. If that doesn’t work feel
free to contact me.

Here is how you do this on the iPhone,
iPad or iPod.

double press the home button. the
multi tasking bar appears.

[ some screen shots ]

long press the app icon and press the
little x that appears on the icon.

[ more screenshots ]

If you want to put buttons for functions that are not obvious for many users you end up with a button for everything. And I (as somebody who knows every function) don’t want a button cluttered user interface.

You would be surprised how many emails I get about “how can I zoom?” (A: Pinch your fingers) or “how do I delete an entry (in a tableview)” (A: Swipe your finger over the entry from left to right, and press the red delete button).

If I get an email about this I just point them to the faq which has some nice screenshots.

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Btw, if the “broken state” happens so often that you would consider adding a special button I would check my code for bugs again.