How can I stop iOS forcing the Cracking the Cryptic web app to refresh

July 12, 2020 10:50 AM

I've been doing some of the Cracking the Cryptic puzzles in the web app on my iPhone Xs (example). When doing them over an extended period of time in Safari or Chrome occasionally the page will be forced to refresh and I lose all my progress. How can I prevent this?

I am still new to these puzzles and I also tend to work on them in short sessions, so it may take me several hours of working time spread over a day or two to complete a puzzle. It's much more convenient for me to do them on my phone as I can do them in-between other things without needing to be at my computer.

I have tried both Safari (my usual browser with all my usual tabs open) and Chrome (with only the puzzle open) and both of them behave like this.

I believe I understand roughly why this is happening (to free up memory that may be needed elsewhere on the assumption that a web page can be reloaded if it's needed again) but not how to prevent this from happening in this case.

I would be happy to pay a few bucks for a good solution. I tried the Offline Pages app thinking that maybe it would manage the memory for offline pages differently (or even save the state of the page!) but it doesn't work with the CTC web app (and I'm not sure if it would have fixed the issue or not).

posted by unus sum to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Looking at the app briefly, I think you're SOL, at least with this specific web app. There are ways to get a web app to persist data across sessions, but this one doesn't appear to do that, and your browser needs to restart to apply updates occasionally (at minimum), so you can't rely on just keeping the tab open, as you've observed. It might be worth looking around to see if there's a clone of the app that does that, but I'm not aware of one off the top of my head.

You might try asking the app developers to add a save/load feature or something.
posted by Aleyn at 11:32 AM on July 12, 2020

This has been bugging me too! Sometimes if I make an update quickly enough after coming back to the puzzle it seems to keep it from refreshing, so I had been wondering if disconnecting from the internet when I return to the puzzle might keep it from refreshing long enough to get working again. Also I take occasional screen captures so I can just fill in to where I was if I lose it. Sorry these aren't real answers but it's been better than nothing...
posted by lemonade at 11:39 AM on July 12, 2020