Apple iPhone users have been cautioned against closing their apps, as it could potentially harm their battery. The warning was posted on the Apple Community page of the company’s official website, debunking the common misconception that closing background apps improves performance and saves battery life.
In the warning, the iPhone expert stresses it’s a “common belief that you should close apps running in background to improve performance and save battery life. Unfortunately, this is a myth that is not true in almost all situations”.
He emphasises that these apps are not actually running in the background but are simply “suspended”. Moreover, there’s no benefit to closing them, and it can actually drain your battery life.
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He clarifies: “It actually worsens battery life, because it takes more energy to load an app than to restart it from the ‘multitasking’ screen. It does not make your phone faster (it actually makes it slower, because it takes longer to initialize an app from storage than to restart it from a suspended state).”
He also dismisses any perceived benefits to the phone’s memory, stressing that closing the app uses more battery – something we need to avoid if we want our phones to last longer.
In fact, tech experts at 9to5Mac say that Apple’s Craig Federighi, senior vice president of Software Engineering who reports to CEO Tim Cook, told them: “Apps that do affect battery life are only things that actually do perform background operations, things like GPS navigation, background music playback and similar.
“However, you only really have these running when you are using them. As such, using force quit (swipe up gesture) should generally only be necessary when an app needs a hard reset as it has glitched or got stuck somehow.”