Quit app when pressing home

Question

I my testing, when I exit (by pressing the home button) my app, it still is "running" in the background, thanks to the multitasking feature. However, I would like it to quit when the home button is pressed. Is this only happening to me?

Anyway, I have tracked it down to the applicationWillResignActive and the applicationDidBecomeActive methods in the app delegate. These get called for multitasking, but when I want to terminate, the app "resigns active." Any guidance on this issue is greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Your application can opt out of multitasking (see the appropriate section in the iPhone Application Programming Guide) by adding the UIApplicationExitsOnSuspend key to your Info.plist and setting its value to YES.

In practice, Apple strongly recommends you not do this unless you have a very good reason for this behavior.

Answer 2

I think it's more efficient to suspend an app, when pressing the "Home" button. There's overhead in constantly launching and terminating apps. It's worse for the iOS operating system, and it's worse for user experience - because they need to wait for the app to launch again. Not sure what benefits you gain from terminating an app. If it's for simulation testing, my advice is to avoid that functionality, because your testing environment should be as realistic as possible. If your purpose is to clear cache or to make updates - that can all be done programmatically from subroutines.

Exiting subroutines

• applicationWillResignActive
• applicationDidEnterBackground
• applicationWillTerminate

Entering subroutines

• applicationDidBecomeActive
• applicationWillEnterForeground
• applicatonDidFinishLaunching

If you still insist on terminating an app when the user presses the "Home" button, despite the costs mentioned above - then set the UIApplicationExitsOnSuspend to true in your Info.plist as suggested by Brad Larson.

Answer 3

I wouldn't recommend trying to control the user's HOME button... deciding for them "exit" or "suspend".

I WOULD like to have HOME do an instant EXIT in the iPhone simulator... but haven't found any way to do that.