Sometimes, I'll get a notification for an interesting story on the Medium app, tap it, opening the story in Medium, but then get interrupted, so I switch to another app, putting Medium in the background. If I'm especially busy, it may stay backgrounded like this for several hours, until I have time to read the story.
Unfortunately, what happens when I bring Medium to the front later is that it "resets" itself to a default landing page, making it difficult to find the story again (the notification is "cleared" by tapping it, so I don't have it to reopen the story.
This happens in other apps, too: I open a specific content item, background the app for some time, then returning to it, only to have my content item replaced by whatever default screen the app thinks I should want to look at.
Is there a way to tell these apps to just open right were I was and stop trying to "help" me so darn much?
I suspect it may have something to do with background refresh or whatever it's called… Thanks in advance.
Edit: Follow-up: Turning off "background refresh" for Medium did not resolve this issue. After leaving an article open in the background overnight, visiting the app this morning "reset" itself again to the home screen. There may be nothing for it.
Best Answer
This is due to the restrictions iOS places on app developers.
Apps are only allowed to stay open in the background for a few minutes (this saves RAM), so if the developer doesn't have the app save where you were last, the app will reset to its start page. So no, you can't do anything about this.
This is why you don't really need to close your apps in the app switcher.