Ah, quite similar but not the same.

The BIG difference is the lack of visual indication. You get a red X over the icons in iOS, and holding down app icons is a means of interaction throughout the OS (and you're given an introduction to this on first login).

The way to close apps in Win8 is not visually indicated and relies on an action that the average user most likely won't discover on their own, or will only by sheer accident.

And a good idea it is, except the quality of first-party apps isn't up to making that transition.

I cannot speak for Android, not being a regular user, but I have never, ever seen a first-party on iOS get its own UI stuck. It may crash rarely, but it will never get itself into a state where the user is powerless to do anything with it (short of killing it).

Most iOS users I've met aren't aware of the kill-app functionality, and they don't need to, because first-party apps don't have egregious enough bugs like "button to return to main menu reacts but does nothing".

Safari on my iPad has recently gotten into the charming habit of, say once every two days, suddenly vanishing all my bookmarks and history - fixable only by a cold app restart : )

I've had some other odd issues with Safari on my 3rd generation iPad:

- About every day (sometimes much more frequently) a tab will just die. You'll click a link or enter a url, and the indicator in the top left corner will start spinning, but nothing ever happens. The only way to fix it is to close the tab and open a new one.

- Less frequently - maybe every few weeks or less - large blocks of web pages will just not render, instead of text or graphics or whatever should be there, there are just giant square white chunks. The only way to fix this is completely reboot the iPad.

I've also had a number of weird problems with the iTunes app that have required finding a way to force the app to quit or reboot the device to fix.

I like my iPad, but Apple's stock apps have quite a bit of room for improvement.

This has been festering for about six months now. It is supremely aggravating.

> Most iOS users I've met aren't aware of the kill-app functionality

Have they ever used the Facebook client before the ObjC rewrite? My girlfriend had to learn both force-killing and pull-to-refresh because of all the bugs (on an iPad if that makes a difference).

The other day, the note app got stuck for me when I touched an email address and tried to create a contact. I had to kill the app.

As does OSX since Lion. I remember my windows friends trolling about it.