You know how all the most recently used apps appear in that special bar of icons when you double press the Home button? I find it tedious to close those icons (double-press, press-and-hold, then press again), but I'm told that there's no real need to close them.
So in the space of a few weeks, I have so many icons in the Recent bar that I have to swipe three times to see them all and find what I want. Which is a lot like swiping through the regular screens to find the app I want, except there I don't have to double-click first.
In other words, the Recent bar seems less convenient, not more. Do you agree? Am I wrong? I don't get it.
I certainly agree that using the "most recent apps" bar to select apps you wish to run is inefficient. If you have a sufficient number of apps to make it difficult to identify the app you want on a single screen (and most of us do), it makes far more sense to organize the apps into groups and place them on separate screens according to some organizational principle you come up with.
The "most recent" bar is useful only to quickly identify apps you've been using very recently (usually the first set shown) for those of us whose short term memory is affected either by age or consumption of recreational substances. It roughly corresponds to the "last six" app box that an Android user can access quickly (by a long press on the Home button) in that environment. Apple apparently felt that it was advantageous in some way to enable the user to see every app they've run since the last system reboot rather than limit the list to some arbitrary number or time slice.
I also suspect that it exists to cope with a condition I've only run across once in the five months I've owned an iPad. Running Rage HD last week, the app reported it did not have enough available memory to run and asked me to close some apps. I suspect that Apple provided the "most recent" bar as a tool to use in that situation. Again, that contrasts with Android's more complex multi-tasking functionality where the OS detects and then resolves that situation without user intervention.
Finally, although it would be very rare in the iOS environment, it's possible (I suspect) that an app could slip past Apple's quality control and "go rogue" by continuing to run even when the user believes he/she has stopped using it. In such a case, the "most recent" bar would be useful in identifying the culprit. That use, of course, is not functionality that Apple would be likely to publicize, but I suspect it may have been a reason the engineers included the feature in a relatively accessible (but otherwise not visible) spot.
