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24th Jul 2017

You really shouldn’t be force-quitting apps on iPhone

Swiping apps closed is actually detrimental

Darragh Murphy

An Apple expert has advised against force-quitting applications on your iPhone.

Most iPhone users find themselves closing apps several times a day by double-tapping the home button and then swiping the background apps away.

It’s largely believed that doing so saves battery and memory on your device but, apparently, that’s not the case whatsoever.

Apple expert John Gruber has revealed that iOS does not work on iPhones and iPads in the way that most users believe and that swiping apps away is actually counter-productive.

In a blog post, Gruber has explained how the process of closing an app saves less battery and time than is required to re-open it the next time you want to use that particular app.

“The iOS system is designed so that none of the above justifications for force quitting are true,” he wrote on Daring Fireball. “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.”

So there you have it. Don’t waste any more time swiping those apps away.

Topics:

iPhone