it stays dead until the system decides to reload it. It may decide to do this for various reasons such a entering a geofence, significant location update, or push notification. But turning off background app refresh should prevent all of these things from turning on your app I think.

Also low power mode can also be used as a sort of incognito mode because it stops all background activity to preserve battery.

And you can turn all of those items off in the app's settings. It might be annoying although because it wont work as you want. It would be nice if apple added a general 'turn off all background activity' permission switch.

Have you checked? I stumbled on it myself with background network, background upload requests get killed when the app is killed, and they don not resume even if you relaunch the app. I have a hunch all other background actitivity is the same way.

Geofence, significant location change, and push waking up the app don't happen on user forced shutdown. App urls though are a different matter. :)

I am not totally sure of geofencing.

>" It may decide to do this for various reasons such a entering a geofence..."

Can you elaborate on this? Whats the connection with relaunching and a geofence?

I haven't worked with goefences, but I'm guessing you can tell the OS you're interested in receiving particular geofence events such as when a user enters one. So the OS will relaunch apps which subscribed to those events so they can act on it.

Someone who has actually worked with geofences, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Geofencing notifies your app when its device enters or leaves geographical regions you set up. If the App is terminated iOS will relaunch it IF the user gave it "Always" authorization for sharing location.