Hi,
we are having a few problem problems with out our app crashing on older ipads and ipods. We had already tested these devices extensively in before release however now that its in userland we are getting quite a few crashes in the same place(ie when they press play!) on the older devices. I've managed to establish this is a memory issue that only occurs on devices with 256MB or less memory with lots of apps running in the background.
There are no memory leaks in the app and it isn't particularly resource heavy but does have a largish memory footprint for older devices (~60 Mb). During the initialisation there is a memory spike, if the app can get over this then the memory returns to normal and there are no problems from then on.
So, finally to my question. How to handle a situation when memory is low due to other unclosed apps? Our current thought is to halt the director and animation then pop an alert with memory warning suggesting the user exit and close other apps before restarting.
I know that really there isn't much we can do about this and through our support channel we've found many of our users don't really know about background apps and how to close them(these are the same user who experience the crash). But its better than having the app just bail from memory exhaustion.
I guess our other alternative is to suggest users with older devices don't use the game, although this seem drastic given it works on these devices given the correct conditions.
Any thoughts welcome.
Regards
Tim