I’ve searched without success for answers on the forum, but perhaps I’m not using the right search term.
What I’m trying to do
What I want is to be able to briefly leave the Obsidian iPhone app to, say, grab some text from another app, or look up some information, then come back to Obsidian.
What’s happening is that leaving the app (only on my phone), even for a second or two, seems to be the same as quitting it. This is a big deal because the app’s start up time is at least 30 seconds.
Is there a setting I’m missing that can keep it open in the background?
OK, that’s not ancient. Do you have a lot of plugins enabled? Here are 2 things to try in Settings > Community Plugins:
Turn on “Debug startup time” and restart Obsidian by swiping it out of the app switcher. When you open Obsidian again, a message will show how long each plugin is taking to load. Take a screenshot for your reference. This might reveal what’s causing the slow startup time, and maybe also the other problem.
If that doesn’t help at all, turn on Restricted Mode and restart Obsidian. This will disable all of your plugins, but if you can manage without them for a bit it will help show whether any plugins might be causing the problem. This probably won’t help with the startup time if you’ve already done the other step, but could show if a plugin is causing the other problem.
Even if startup time speeds up, I’m wondering why the app restarts every single time I’m not actively engaged with it? Other apps stay open in the background, at least for a few minutes.
I suspect the problems are connected. It sounds like something is hogging resources.
When you switch apps, background apps are put in a suspended state. When the current app needs more memory, iOS makes more available by closing background apps. So it may be that Obsidian is using an abnormal amount of memory which makes it prone to being closed. Or maybe your other apps are memory-hungry, tho if that were true I’d expect other apps to be closing too.
iOS tries to avoid inconveniencing you when it closes apps. Maybe it has somehow misidentified Obsidian’s priority; I don’t know what could be done about that other than rebooting the phone to try to “jiggle the handle”, or maybe reinstalling the app (if it comes to that, backup your vault because it will be deleted with the app).