Hey guys. BuildIt has been crashing in a similar fashion on my wife's iPad 2 as well, but runs without a hitch on my Nexus 5X, so I decided to investigate for her. 3D games such as this require a high amount of RAM (random access memory) in order to run, and Apple's mobile products seem to be pretty notorious for not having much RAM (more profit for Apple ...). The iPad 2 specifically has only 512 MB of RAM, whereas you probably couldn't even find a phone on the market these days with less than 2 GB. I'm suspecting this is the reason Apple doesn't even list RAM amounts for most of its iPad products on their website. They just ignore the issue.
It's very likely the issue most of you are experiencing is not EA's responsibility, but the fact that you have very inadequate hardware. When RAM is exceeded, an operating system will typically close apps until it can function normally - i.e. the "crashing" of BuildIt. Of course, larger cities and Wi-Fi connectivity enabling background downloads etc. will greatly increase RAM use. That's why many of you have had some success in closing background apps and disabling Wi-Fi.
If an analogy helps, think of your 16 GB / 32 GB / 64 GB etc "memory" storage as the space you have in your fridge. You can hold a lot of food in your fridge with any of those amounts - more than enough for this BuildIt game. But to play the game (i.e. cook the food), you need a certain amount of counter space for chopping, etc. Running BuildIt on an iPad 2, you're trying to cut a Thanksgiving turkey on a counter the size of a Post-It note. You simply don't have enough space to operate, so the app gets closed.
It doesn't really matter how good a processor you have (i.e. how fast you can cook), because you can't even fit the food on the counter to start.
As I implied earlier, 2GB RAM is pretty standard for mobile devices these days, and it will continue to increase. Always check a device's RAM amount before buying, and be wary if that information isn't given upfront as in Apple's case.
This probably doesn't apply to all crash instances, but it's likely the unfortunate answer for iPad 2 owners and iPad mini 2 owners, as they have 512 MB and 1 GB of RAM respectively.
Hope this helps clear the issue up a bit. If you can somehow move your save files to any device with more RAM, the game should run as expected.
