Apple: Turning off apps running in the background is useless, it only wastes battery life

Many iPhone users have the habit of regularly opening the multitasking window and swiping off unused applications, in the belief that this will help free up memory, processing power as well as energy, thereby saving energy. Save battery and make the device run "smoother".

However, according to information from Apple, this belief is probably not really true. Apple's own instructions for closing background apps state that "you should only close an app if it is unresponsive." And there's a good reason for that - iOS has long been designed to ensure background apps use virtually no iPhone's RAM or CPU.

A few years ago, Craig Federighi (Senior Vice President of Software Engineering) at Apple even mentioned this topic and gave his opinion. According to MacRumors, a reader emailed Tim Cook directly to get a definitive answer to a question about closing background apps and claimed to have received a response from Federighi.

The email asked, " Do you frequently quit multitasking apps on iOS and does this help your battery life? ". Craig's response was brief and stated the answer to both was No, then he thanked the email sender for being an Apple customer.

MacRumors later confirmed this email. In addition, from a technical perspective, frequently closing apps in the multitasking window can have a worse impact on the iPhone than just leaving them running in the background.

That's because iOS is very effective at suspending apps that aren't being used - these apps "freeze" when running in the background. Apps hanging in the multitasking window don't really affect your battery or performance. The fact that users can still see them when swiping up from the bottom of the home screen is just a visual indicator, letting them know that they were recently opened and ready to resume when needed.

Although it may seem counterintuitive, it is better for battery consumption to leave apps alone until needed again. This is because closing apps and having to reopen them later often consumes more battery power than simply leaving them in the background, as the first launch of most apps requires a boost in performance for a while. short to load and collect their data. Simply put, it's like turning the air conditioner on/off continuously will consume more electricity than just leaving it running.

An application frozen on the multitasking screen will consume less power, except for applications that play music or use GPS. For social networking applications, even if they are turned off, they actually still have to run in the background to push notifications to you, so this is quite meaningless.

Isabella Humphrey

Update 27 April 2024