Basically, when the app crashes while commenting, it recovers the text you had written out… but then dumps you back to the main feed with that just in your clipboard, waiting for you to comment on the next post and go “oh yeah, crap” because you can’t find the post and go back to browsing.
When hide read posts is functioning as intended (which it hasn’t been for a while and may be related to version…? Idk how it works, and that’s not the point of this anyway), you shouldn’t even be able to find the post you would have replied to, and unless it’s from a community you follow, you’ll never find it again.
Maybe this is too much to ask; I’m not a programmer so I don’t know what I’m asking, but it would be super great when the app crashes to not only preserve the text, but maybe provide a link back to the post it was being made under (not necessarily the exact comment, but the parent post would help a ton). I’ve just sort of given up on long comments I spent a lot of time formatting because the app crashed and I couldn’t find the post I was replying to. And that’s really frustrating.
Apollo had this same bug before the API-colypse, and it’s supposedly because iOS memory management doesn’t actually alert an app that it’s being closed in the background. When you swipe away from an app, the phone automatically determines when to close it in the background; Even if it is still visible on your list of running apps, it may actually be closed. (This is also why iOS doesn’t bother giving you a “Close all background apps” button like android does. It just automatically closes background apps.) It closes it without warning, and the app is forced to refresh the next time it is opened. The app maker has zero control over this; It’s something the OS does automatically.
So maybe you swipe away to do something small, and your comment is fine when you return. But maybe you swipe away to something more memory-hungry (like maybe you want to go grab a video link.) Now your phone goes “oh hey I need a lot of memory. Time to dump some background apps.” And so even though you were only gone from the app for a few seconds or minutes, the phone still purged it.
Could it be fixed? Yeah, probably. AlienBlue (the precursor to Apollo) solved it by saving your progress occasionally, but that had problems of its own. For instance, your cache would eventually balloon to massive sizes, and it also caused excess power drain from constantly writing to your phone’s memory.