Some iPad Air owners have been impacted by a persistent crashing issue, where either the entire device crashes and reboots, or, more commonly, where the Safari browser crashes and randomly quits. The Safari crashing issue is often repeatable by pointing Safari at several Javascript heavy web pages with numerous tabs open, or by opening a PDF within a browser window with many tabs open. Upon investigating the iPad Air crash logs, the issue is almost always shown as a low memory error, signifying that available system resources are insufficient for the Safari actions.
Sure, there have been a variety of workarounds offered to prevent the iPad crashes, ranging from using fewer tabs when browsing with Safari, to turning off Javascript completely, to using alternate web browsers on iOS like Chrome, but none of those options are particularly ideal. Fortunately, the freshly pushed iOS 7.1 update may bring relief to many users who have experienced random crashing on the iPad Air.
Simply updating to iOS 7.1 through Over-The-Air or from iTunes may be enough for some iPad Air users, but if not, several of our readers have reported they have completely resolved the low memory crashes by performing clean installs of iOS 7.1 on their devices. Once a clean install has been performed, there doesn’t (yet) seem to be an indicator that setting the device up as new or that restoring from a backup has any difference, though since iOS 7.1 is still a fresh update it may take some time for results to come in about which is more effective.
Performing a clean install of iOS 7.1 is a fairly simple process, but for the unfamiliar we’ll walk through the steps below:
- Connect the iPad Air to a computer and launch iTunes
- Back up the iPad to iCloud or iTunes, if not both – do not skip the backup process!
- Select the iPad Air within iTunes, then choose the “Restore iPad” option
- Confirm that you want to Restore the device, which will erase everything on the iPad Air and reinstall iOS 7.1
The rest is pretty straight forward, iOS 7.1 will download from Apple’s servers, the device will reset to factory settings, and once it has rebooted you can either choose to set up the device as brand new as if it was right off the factory floor, or restore it from the backup you made to get everything instantly back to where you left it.
Because restoring an iOS device requires the firmware to download from Apple, that is usually why the process takes a while, thus some users may wish to expedite the process by downloading iOS 7.1 IPSW ahead of time while on a higher speed internet connection, then using the IPSW manually or simply placing the firmware file in the necessary iTunes folder on a computer to prevent the download from occurring again. Using ISPW is generally considered more advanced, but you can learn about it here.
We’ve heard several reports of this completely resolving the low memory errors and crashes with the iPad Air, a problem that seemingly was unique to that device and that did not appear on the iPhone or other iPad models. If you clean install iOS 7.1, let us know in the comments if this has resolved the low memory crashing for your iPad Air.
Follow Me:
Top Best Sellers!!
