Stop Quitting Your iPhone Apps

Do you still do this? Swipe away every last app on your iPhone until there’s nothing left? Come close here for a second, listen carefully. STOP IT

I see so many people still quitting every app, and they think it’s helping their iPhone app and keeping everything tidy. Maya be it’s because you don’t want your apps doing things in the background when you’re not looking. But the fact is, your iPhone would be better off if you didn’t swipe all those apps.

You don’t have to believe me on this one. Apple’s own support article on closing apps on your iPhone says, “You should quit an app only if it’s unresponsive.” Meaning frozen or won’t respond to taps.

Or you can refer this email from Apple’s own Senior Vice President of Software Engineers, Craig Federighi. When asked, “Do you quit your iOS app and is this necessary for battery life,” Federighi said: No and no!

You can also refer to Apple pundit John Gruber, The New York Times, and others that all say the same thing: Don’t quit your iPhone apps.

I know it’s a tough habit to break, and sometimes you just want a clean app switcher. But the bottom line is your iPhone and iPad are really smart about handling applications in the background.

When you open app, your iPhone places that app in Active mode. As long as the app is on screen it remains active and it can do whatever it needs to function. Your iPhone also writes that app and its data to RAM, that’s the old school term for Random Access Memory.

Your devices only have a limited amount of RAM, and iPhone 14 has 6GB. When it comes to iPhone or iPad apps, that’s typically more than enough for lots of apps to be in RAM at any given time.

When you swipe up to go Home, the previously active app goes into Background mode. Here the app is allowed to finish whatever tasks you as the user started. Maybe that’s posting an image to social media or uploading a file to Dropbox.

There are also special cases when an app can remain in this background mode to continue an activity when not on screen. Think music and podcast apps. They need to continue playing background audio even when you go home and lock your screen, so there are special cases for that.

Once an app finished its tasks and if it’s not doing anything like background audio, your iPhone will force it into the Suspended mode. Here the app is frozen and is not putting any strain on your battery or iPhone processor. BUT, here’s the key part: it’s still in RAM.

That means when you go to re-open that app, as long as you didn’t swipe up and quit it, your iPhone can re-animate from RAM very quickly. Faster than if it was restarting that app from scratch. This is oppose to the other scenario, like when you quit every single app, and your iPhone has to open it from scratch again.

So, that means it is much more efficient, both in processor power and battery life, to leave your apps open and let your iPhone suspend them as needed. It’s smart enough, and has the ability to force apps into that suspended mode to make sure you get the fastest experience when re-opening that app.

Now, all that being said, sometimes there ARE applications that try to cheat the system. I remember at one time a social media app that will remain nameless, would play continuous, silent audio when you opened the app so it could remain active in the Background. SUPER dirty trick.

You may find some of those “free” games you download to try underhanded strategies like that as well. But you can do some minor sleuthing to find out which apps are being nefarious without quitting all those app all the time.

Go to Settings on your iPhone, and then battery. When you scroll down, you’ll see the percentage of battery each app has taken that day. If you tap on one of those apps, you’ll see the time spent on screen and the time in the background.

Some apps will have expected background activity, like a podcast player. But others may spend hours doing stuff in the background, and those are the culprits of battery life drain. You have a couple options here.

If you want to swipe up only those apps, go for it. And to keep apps like Facebook or TikTok in check, you can force quit those too. But you can also go back to the Settings app > General > Background app Refresh and disable the toggle for apps that do a little to much in the background.

But don’t turn off background app refresh for all your apps. Remember, your iPhone is pretty smart, it’ll handle managing your apps and RAM.

Secondly, some apps may be accessing your location too often and hurting your battery life. These could be weather apps, ride sharing services, or other just random apps that want your location data for ads.

To manage that, go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services, and you can see all the apps that have pinged your location in the last 24 hours. Then you can disable location data for that app, choose to allow location only when the app is Active on screen, and you can also choose just to allow approximate location rather than give an app pinpoint location accuracy.

So that’s why you shouldn’t swipe all those apps away every time you close your iPhone. Just…stop it. Let me know in the comments…do you still swipe up all your apps? Hopefully not after this video.