Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Mobile
  3. Guides

Should you force quit iOS apps?

Jackie Dove
By

Back in the day — and even now, for many people — it was common practice for iOS users to force quit apps they were finished using. The idea is that open apps consume battery power because they run or refresh in the background and operate more or less on a continuous basis. That might sound sensible, but there’s a problem with this analysis — according to Apple, it’s not true.

Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, was asked specifically if he force quits apps and if force quitting salvages battery life. The 9to5Mac site quoted his response: No and no. According to Apple’s support page, you should manually close or force quit apps only when they malfunction or are unresponsive. Should that happen, here’s what to do.

  • On an iPhone X or later or an iPad running iOS 12 or later or iPadOS, swipe up from the bottom of the home screen and pause slightly in the middle of the screen. On an iPhone 8 or earlier or on the new iPhone SE, double-click the Home button to view the recently used apps.
  • Swipe in either direction to locate the app you want to close.
  • Swipe up on the app’s preview pane to close it.
Recommended Videos

You never have to close all your apps because iOS itself handles memory and battery allocation and background actions without manual intervention. Recently used apps may appear, but they are not open in the conventional sense. Rather, they are held in standby mode until you need them, so you don’t have to go through the trouble of relaunching them. The apps that appear in the switcher are not actually running, are not using RAM, and are not using processor cycles. It is simply a history of the apps you have used in the past — analogous to the Mac’s Recent Items menu.

Related

For an errant app that’s not behaving, you should definitely force quit it. Even better, if you find your phone or tablet is inexplicably slowing down and you suspect it’s because a single app is causing problems, instead of force quitting, simply power off the device and restart the system. That may seem more radical, but it is the most likely action that will give you the improved performance you seek. Don’t make a habit of it unless you’ve got plenty of time on your hands, though. Restarting an iPhone or iPad can take up to a minute.

Most apps play nicely with your device when delegated to the background by essentially freezing and thus freeing up resources. The best way to determine what apps are consuming battery resources is to go to Settings > Battery > Battery Usage. You can also go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh and choose which apps get permission to relaunch. If you force quit one of these apps, though, it may not get permission to relaunch.

The operating system devotes the majority of system resources to the app you are currently running and perhaps a couple of others that you used most recently, so if you return shortly, your device does not have to expend resources to relaunch. Force quitting defeats that conservation purpose by preventing iOS from lowering CPU and memory usage, because a fresh launch consumes more power.

When you move out of an app, iOS takes a snapshot of the app’s state and the operation you’re performing within the app. That snapshot gets saved to the device’s storage, which takes up a minuscule amount of memory. Then, the OS closes the app. When you tap it again, the app reopens to exactly where you left it. Swiping to close it deletes that saved state and purges the app’s code from the device’s RAM, which also uses processor cycles and will drain the battery if you do it habitually. Force quitting requires the device to reload the app the next time you launch it, so for frequently used apps, force quitting and relaunching are detrimental.

Not quitting apps also saves you the time of hunting them down for relaunch, especially if they reside in nested folders. Relaunching them from the app switcher is much faster since apps should be easier to find.

Old habits die hard, but letting iOS or iPadOS do its job by regulating your device’s memory and battery resources should be a no-brainer.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Jackie Dove
Jackie Dove
Contributor
Jackie is an obsessive, insomniac tech writer and editor in northern California. A wildlife advocate, cat fan, and photo app…
Your iPhone just got a new iOS update, and you should download it right now
iPhone 15 Pro display with iPhone 15 Pro Max in background.

Apple has just released a new security update, iOS 17.4.1. This comes a little over two weeks after iOS 17.4, which was a big update. iOS 17.4.1 doesn't add any new features, but it's still an important update you'll want to download as soon as you can.

With iOS 17.4.1, Apple states that the update “provides important bug fixes and security updates and is recommended for all users.” Apple doesn’t mention any specifics of these bug fixes, but more details on what this security update addresses may be revealed at a later date.

Read more
YouTube TV just got even better on iPhones and iPads
Multiview on YouTube TV on an iPad.

If you use the most popular live-streaming service on an iPhone or iPad, things just got even better. YouTube TV — which boasts more than 8 million subscribers — just pushed multiview live on Apple's mobile devices, as previously promised.

It works basically the same way it does on a television. YouTube TV picks the programs available in multiview, and you get them all at once, with audio coming from one of the shows. Tap another, and the audio switches. And just as before, you can get multiview for sports, news, business, or weather. (Though we definitely don't recommend watching four news channels at once in an election year.) It's just in time for March Madness, which is great, though we hope you'll be able to pick your own games instead of just sticking with the multiple viewing options YouTube TV gives. This will be great come fall, though, when the new season of NFL Sunday Ticket takes hold.

Read more
The 10 best apps for a second phone number in 2024
OnePlus 5 soft gold with the phone app open.

Having a second phone number can be handy for a variety of reasons. Perhaps you want to separate your business and personal calls, or you want a junk second number that you can use to sign up for services so you can avoid giving out your personal number to so many places. That's particularly importance with the frequency of annoying spam calls and messages that can pile up when your phone number is made public. You might also want a second number to use in situations where you want to be able to contact people occasionally but you don't necessarily want them to be able to reach your personal device directly, like when internet dating or using an app like AirBnB. Whatever the reason, there are many situations where having a number that you can give out which you can make use of but isn't directly tied to your personal life like your main phone number is can be important for safety and security.

While you could get a second SIM card (or even an eSIM), an easier option for casual use is to use an app that lets you set up a second phone line. Whether you're after an Android app or an iPhone app, you'll find plenty of options to get a second phone line, including some which are free to use. We've hunted down some of the best options for apps that will give you a second phone number for whatever reason you need it, and we're sharing them with you below.
Vyke

Read more