One of the most looked forward to updates with iOS4 is the multitasking feature. Along with this came many issues, such as too many programs running at once, causing extremely low memory making your iDevice slower, and draining the battery much faster. This guide will tell you how to disable multitasking on any iDevice that came with no capability to turn that feature off.

1. Download iFile from Cydia
2. Open iFile and navigate to the folder
/System/Library/CoreServices/SpringBoard.app
3. Look for a file called N##AP.plist. The ## will be 2 numbers, depending on your iDevice. Mine for a 3rd gen ipT it is N72AP.plist
4. Open this file and edit it
5. Go to the <dict>Capabilities
6. Add this after that line:
<key>multitasking</key>
<false/>
7. Respring to have multitasking disabled and it will work exactly like the 3.x firmware
8. If you would like to turn it back on, simply delete the 2 lines you added and respring.

NOTE: You might have 2 or more files that look like N##AP.plist. Use the file that contains your iDevice name in it. Look through the file and there should he a line in it that contains the name of the iDevice. Look through ALL the files to find the name that BEST describes your iDevice.

Do I face any problem once I edit it?

No, this should not cause any problems, it will just disable multitasking. If you enter the lines wrong, iFile will give you an error (sort of like a compile error in cc++) telling you what you did wrong and not let you save the file until you fix it.

guys.. actually u can disable the apps running in the background.

1) Double-click the Home button to show the list of apps running in the background.
2) Select and hold any of the icons to make them wriggle just like moving the icons on the pages.
3) Click on the red icon on the top left corner of the apps and that will stop the apps running in the background. It is like deleting the apps from the main pages, but this selection will kill the apps running in the background.

This is what I gathered from reading the info on the iPhone section on Apple's website. Tried it and it works fine on my iPhone.

Originally Posted by discman24

guys.. actually u can disable the apps running in the background.

1) Double-click the Home button to show the list of apps running in the background.
2) Select and hold any of the icons to make them wriggle just like moving the icons on the pages.
3) Click on the red icon on the top left corner of the apps and that will stop the apps running in the background. It is like deleting the apps from the main pages, but this selection will kill the apps running in the background.

This is what I gathered from reading the info on the iPhone section on Apple's website. Tried it and it works fine on my iPhone.

That might be true, but it's too much of a pain to do that. There is no point for multitasking at all, and it's not even true multitasking. Not to mention the fact that the service is running in the background taking up resources and battery power.

In some cases, this doesn't even kill the process. A lot of the time it just removes it from that multitasking tray. I constantly have to run SBSettings and launch the process monitor to kill programs that I don't want eating my RAM in the background.

Thankfully I haven't noted any battery life issues because of it, but I get frustrated when I'm running an iPhone4 and look and see myself with under 60MB of free RAM.

Originally Posted by n1ckn4m3

Thankfully I haven't noted any battery life issues because of it, but I get frustrated when I'm running an iPhone4 and look and see myself with under 60MB of free RAM.

The whole point of iOS is that nearly all of the RAM should be in use at any time. It is the way that it is designed/optimised. So don't be stressed that your free memory is low. Generally this is not going to use more battery.

Although I feel the multiasking could be improved/fine tuned. For example today, I had jerky response when playing a game while it was checking mail in the background. There were quite a few backgrounded processes and I felt that iOS should notice that resources were tight and pro-actively kill a backgrounded and inactive process first, then check mail. That way there is a bit more leg room to avoid lags. Expecting 4.1 to be a bit better with this.

Originally Posted by Olethros

The whole point of iOS is that nearly all of the RAM should be in use at any time. It is the way that it is designed/optimised. So don't be stressed that your free memory is low. Generally this is not going to use more battery.

Definitely true -- I complain because Apps will kick and give me the "Your device is low on memory." pop-up when according to the multitask tray, nothing else is running .

In any case though, just like Windows 7 (which people complained used too much RAM for the same reason, and were incorrect for the same reason), you're 100% correct -- paging the app / data to RAM makes accessing it notably faster than pulling from storage to RAM, so I shouldn't worry too much about how much is free unless it starts negatively impacting the phone's use.

Originally Posted by Olethros

The whole point of iOS is that nearly all of the RAM should be in use at any time. It is the way that it is designed/optimised. So don't be stressed that your free memory is low. Generally this is not going to use more battery.

Although I feel the multiasking could be improved/fine tuned. For example today, I had jerky response when playing a game while it was checking mail in the background. There were quite a few backgrounded processes and I felt that iOS should notice that resources were tight and pro-actively kill a backgrounded and inactive process first, then check mail. That way there is a bit more leg room to avoid lags. Expecting 4.1 to be a bit better with this.

The battery life does decrease because of the increased processor demand to run the backgrounded programs, and the background processes seriously start building up and stealing the processor power. Also, most of the slowness comes from the processor working more on background programs then the one at hand, one big way apple could significantly improve their multitasking feature is to make sure the current program has higher priority than the ones running in the background. This was also the major issue with windows vista.

Originally Posted by bearsomg

The battery life does decrease because of the increased processor demand to run the backgrounded programs, and the background processes seriously start building up and stealing the processor power. Also, most of the slowness comes from the processor working more on background programs then the one at hand, one big way apple could significantly improve their multitasking feature is to make sure the current program has higher priority than the ones running in the background. This was also the major issue with windows vista.

You are (mostly) misinformed. Or using the wrong terminology.

The large majority of apps that are available support only fast app switching. This feature uses zero CPU while the app is not in the foreground. It uses only memory and that has negligible impact on battery

The other background APIs can use some CPU when the app is not in foreground - these are voip, location (gps) background audio and task completion. (also local notifications but I think the backgrounding is handled by the OS rather than per app)

Task completion has a fixed maximum time it can use to complete the task the app was in the middle of when the app was sent to the background.

The other three can run indefinitely in the background and use some CPU. I have noticed this with Skype which starts it's background voip and audio process when the iPhone boots up. The battery does drain faster with skype in the background waiting for a call.

The point is today most apps don't use these additional background features - so don't use extra battery.

Those that do use extra features can register to start when the iPhone boots - this is mostly useful for voip.