You grab your parents’ iPhone for a moment, look at the apps open in the background, and see that there are a lot of them. And the impulse is probably to turn them off because then iOS can forget about them, which will save memory and battery consumption. Neither one nor the other are correct conclusions..

It’s been debated for years whether closing apps in the background helps the battery, but for years both Apple and its engineers have made it clear that this option has no benefit if saving battery is what we’re looking for.

A year ago, a former Apple engineer made this clear on Twitter. He noted that the company will never implement the option to close all open apps, like those found on Android, because “it’s not necessary.”

However, iOS development lead Craig Federighi announced this long ago. In an email published on 9to5Mac, the administrator gave a completely clear answer on whether it is necessary to close background apps: ““no and no” he said.

Apple’s own support pages state that force quitting an app should only be done if the app is behaving erratically or crashing. This section of Apple support clearly states, “Only close an app if it is unresponsive.”

A user named Lawrence Finch also gave a good summary of why closing apps doesn’t work if we want to save battery. As he explains:

• Apps “not running” in the background, but they were suspended
• Closing apps actually worsens battery life because the device consumes more power when loading an app than when restarting or “waking” the app from sleep.
• Closing apps doesn’t make the iPhone faster either. In fact, the opposite is true, because starting an application from scratch takes longer than starting it from suspended state.
• Does not free up RAM memory because iOS has very effective mechanisms for managing available memory, so this “clearing” when closing applications is of no use.

So it’s clear: there is no benefit in closing applications that are present in the background. If what we want is to save iPhone battery life, then yes, we can follow these 28 extra tips to achieve it.

Picture | Georgi Lyamin

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