Apple has confirmed that you shouldn’t close open apps on your iPhone unless they stop responding.
You might occasionally glance through your apps in your carousel and recoil in horror when you see about 42 of them – but it turns out you’re right to leave them as they are.
Yes, while you might assume that having so many ‘open’ apps would make your iPhone slower and drain your battery faster, that’s not the case.
And it actually closes—and then reopens—apps that could seriously damage your battery.
Apple recommends shutting down apps only if they stop working properly—otherwise, leave them alone.
Apple explains: “When your recently used apps appear, the apps aren’t open, but they’re on standby to help you navigate and multitask.
“You should only force close the application if it is unresponsive.”
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The false belief that fewer apps means longer battery life comes from the mistaken belief that the apps that appear on the ‘carousel’ are actually running.
They are not. They’re just frozen so they don’t take any extra resources from the device while you’re doing whatever else you’re doing.
Tech journalist John Gruber offered further insight on the Daring Fireball blog into why closing apps can actually be bad for your battery.
Gruber explained, “Background apps 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’s so good that unfreezing a frozen app takes much less CPU (and power) than restarting an app that was force closed.
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“Not only does force closing your apps not help, it actually hurts. Battery life will be worse and it will take much longer to switch apps if you force close apps in the background.”
Gruber continued, “If you’re worried about background apps draining your battery and you see how quickly they load from the background, it’s a reasonable assumption to believe they never stopped running.
“But they are. They really freeze, the RAM they were using is really reclaimed by the system, and they really unfreeze and come back to life so quickly.”
So there you go – never feel guilty about seeing so many apps running on your iPhone again.
Featured image credit: Getty Stock Images/Matt Cardy/Getty Images
Topics: Apple, iPhone, technology