Since the upgrade to iOS 6, we are seeing Safari's web view take the liberty of caching $.ajax calls. This is in the context of a PhoneGap application so it is using the Safari WebView. Our $.ajax calls are POST methods and we have cache set to false {cache:false}, but still this is happening. We tried manually adding a timestamp to the headers but it did not help.

We did more research and found that Safari is only returning cached results for web services that have a function signature that is static and does not change from call to call. For instance, imagine a function called something like:

getNewRecordID(intRecordType)

This function receives the same input parameters over and over again, but the data it returns should be different every time.

Must be in Apple's haste to make iOS 6 zip along impressively they got too happy with the cache settings. Has anyone else seen this behavior on iOS 6? If so, what exactly is causing it?

The workaround that we found was to modify the function signature to be something like this:

getNewRecordID(intRecordType, strTimestamp)

and then always pass in a timestamp parameter as well, and just discard that value on the server side. This works around the issue. I hope this helps some other poor soul who spends 15 hours on this issue like I did!