Should you quit your iPhone apps after using them?
You may have been told to force quit the apps you're not using on your iPhone to save the battery, but it turns out that, force-quitting your iPhone apps is actually draining the battery instead. To be clear, force-quitting your apps is when you double tap the home button to make all of your open apps show up — you then swipe them to force-quit. Even Apple employees have recommended against force-quitting iPhone apps — Apple's software SVP has even said it's not necessary.
The single biggest misconception about iOS is that its good digital hygiene to force quit apps that you aren’t using,. The idea is that apps in the background are locking up unnecessary RAM and consuming unnecessary CPU cycles, thus hurting performance and wasting battery life. That’s not how iOS works.
I'm not sure where this force-quit rumor started, but pretty much every iPhone user I know thinks this is the way to save battery life, and we're all wondering why our batteries are draining faster instead. In fact, Steve Jobs said in 2010: "Just use [iOS multitasking] as designed, and you’ll be happy, No need to ever quit apps".
The force-quit myth is so pervasive that I have even heard Apple store employees have recommended it to customers.
The iOS system is designed so that none of the above justifications for force quitting are true. Apps in the background are effectively 'frozen,' severely limiting what they can do in the background and freeing up the RAM they were using, iOS is really, really good at this. It is so good at this that unfreezing a frozen app takes up way less CPU (and energy) than relaunching an app that had been force quit. Not only does force quitting your apps not help, it actually hurts. Your battery life will be worse and it will take much longer to switch apps if you force quit apps in the background.
A lot of work went into creating an iOS that keeps your apps open but doesn't run them while you're not using them. And every iPhone user in the world who habitually force quits background apps manually is wasting all of the effort that went into this while simultaneously wasting their own device’s battery life and making everything slower for themselves.
The single biggest misconception about iOS is that its good digital hygiene to force quit apps that you aren’t using,. The idea is that apps in the background are locking up unnecessary RAM and consuming unnecessary CPU cycles, thus hurting performance and wasting battery life. That’s not how iOS works.
I'm not sure where this force-quit rumor started, but pretty much every iPhone user I know thinks this is the way to save battery life, and we're all wondering why our batteries are draining faster instead. In fact, Steve Jobs said in 2010: "Just use [iOS multitasking] as designed, and you’ll be happy, No need to ever quit apps".
The force-quit myth is so pervasive that I have even heard Apple store employees have recommended it to customers.
The iOS system is designed so that none of the above justifications for force quitting are true. Apps in the background are effectively 'frozen,' severely limiting what they can do in the background and freeing up the RAM they were using, iOS is really, really good at this. It is so good at this that unfreezing a frozen app takes up way less CPU (and energy) than relaunching an app that had been force quit. Not only does force quitting your apps not help, it actually hurts. Your battery life will be worse and it will take much longer to switch apps if you force quit apps in the background.
A lot of work went into creating an iOS that keeps your apps open but doesn't run them while you're not using them. And every iPhone user in the world who habitually force quits background apps manually is wasting all of the effort that went into this while simultaneously wasting their own device’s battery life and making everything slower for themselves.