I have an iPad 2 that’s about… three years old? Something like that. Anyway, I’ve noticed lately that when I open the cover and wake it from sleep, the wifi indicator is greyed out, disappears entirely for a second, then reconnects. I’ve never seen it do that before; it’s always woken up with the connection it slept with.
Could this be at all indicative of any kind of problem?
Probably your last update f@cked with your iPad. I haven’t had an update in the last 2 years that hasn’t had a problem. A few of them have rendered my iPad unusable for a few days. The bastards.
Looks like the problem isn’t recurring so far after the latest OS update, so it appears the above was correct. 
It also seems to have fixed the crashing in another app after update, so I guess it was important.
Bumping to sigh and note that I have not one, not two, but THREE apps crashing on startup now. Sigh.
Maybe disable them from launching at start up.
There’s no such thing as as apps that launch on OS startup on iOS. The OP means the apps crash when he tries to open them.
Email the developers if they are listed as iPad 2 compatible but still crash.