I updated my old iPhone 3GS over the air to IOS 5.0.1 two days ago and the experience was a cool one. This is the first time I could do something like that without needing to connect my phone to iTunes.
However, there were a few problems with the upgrade. I found out that my phone was slower, and applications are crashing more frequently. Applications like WhatsApp, or Facebook kept crashing seconds after I launched them, and thus rendered the phone useless.
I finally could not take it anymore and took it upon myself to find a solution to this. When I launched SystemLite, it showed that I only had only 3-4 MB of free RAM. Something is very weird here as I am supposed to have 256MB RAM for 3GS, and the numbers don't add up. I think there is some serious flaw in IOS memory management.
Anyway, by accident, I found a way to work around this issue. Apparently IOS gives more priority to its core app like Camera. Anytime I found my applications are crashing like crazy, all I need to do is to launch Camera, kill it and then I suddenly will have more than 100MB of RAM. And from that point on all the apps will be running fine. I have tested it on a few phones and a number of times, and it has worked like a charm. It even worked on older version of IOS.
The following is a series of steps to demonstrate how this works:
- Trying to launch my Facebook. The splash screen showed up but then it crashed within a few seconds.
- Launching SystemLite and it shows that I only have 3MB of RAM free.
- So I just launched the Camera app and it crashed too.
- But now when I opened up the SystemLite, the available memory suddenly becomes 115MB.
- And from this point on my Facebook works like a charm.