One of my pet peeves is people saying this about iOS. What he says is a half-truth, a mixture of two different features. ( Link TLDR: Apple takes a screenshot of your app and shows it on launch )
What actually happens: When you background the app, Apple takes a screenshot to do the fade-out animation with. This caused a bit of hubhub a few years ago because if you jailbreak you can find the screenshot of the last closed app .
It's actually the developers job to give a launch image for the app itself, and the apple guidelines are that you should aim to emulate your app's homepage with no data in it. You don't have to, we don't at http://art.sy - Which isn't Apple taking a screengrab.
A simple way to think about this is, what happens if you open the app in a different orientation a screenshot wouldnt work then.
The poster is right, iOS takes a screenshot and uses it when switching to your app. The default.png is used only when you first open the app (ie, it was closed).
What happens when you switch orientations? The screenshot/app will show as rotated and rotate to whatever angle the device is currently at.
I don't understand the technique at art.sy - It loads a lot of stuff when you open a page for the first time but interestingly when you navigate for another page, it does not seem to be loading anything except for a 1x1 gif. How come the URL changes (full change not just like hashbangs) but nothing particular is loaded from the server? Is there a name for this technique? Is there any framework supports this?
Sorry, I should have been more specific, I meant for the art.sy iPad app! A lot of what the website does is black-magic (or backbone js -whichever) to me :)
What actually happens: When you background the app, Apple takes a screenshot to do the fade-out animation with. This caused a bit of hubhub a few years ago because if you jailbreak you can find the screenshot of the last closed app .
It's actually the developers job to give a launch image for the app itself, and the apple guidelines are that you should aim to emulate your app's homepage with no data in it. You don't have to, we don't at http://art.sy - Which isn't Apple taking a screengrab.
A simple way to think about this is, what happens if you open the app in a different orientation a screenshot wouldnt work then.