Stop Closing Your iPhoneâs Background Apps
We All Perform This iPhone Maintenance Ritual, But It's a Mythical Waste of Time That's Been Around For Years.
â By Maxwell Zeff | Monday February 19th, 2024 | Gizmodo
Photo: Mr.Mikla (Shutterstock)
Apple users seem unanimously convinced that closing background apps is a good habit, but itâs more likely a waste of time. For too long, Iâve watched friends and family orchestrate a frenzy of up-swipes from their iPhoneâs multitasking screen to cleanse themselves of countless open background apps.
Perhaps this mythical ritual of iPhone maintenance will save battery, make your phone run faster, or stop social media companies from tracking you. While itâs not crazy to think so, itâs simply a lie weâve all been living. Closing background apps does nothing because those apps arenât actually ârunning.â
In 2016, Appleâs senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, confirmed that closing your background apps does nothing for your battery life, in response to a customerâs email shared with 9to5Mac. On a technical level, most of your background apps are essentially frozen, and your system just displays a screenshot of them for consistency. The impact on your battery life is negligible.
The same can be said for Android as well. In fact, closing your background apps actually uses more battery than just leaving them open. Thatâs because shutting down and initializing an app requires more energy than restoring it from its suspended state in your âbackground.â
Federighi also notes that closing background apps does nothing to improve your phoneâs performance, for many of the same reasons it doesnât affect your battery. iOS manages your iPhoneâs RAM as efficiently as possible by default, and closing your background apps does not optimize anything.
In terms of privacy, force-closing apps do nothing to stop companies from tracking you, according to The Washington Post. Apps can still collect your data even if theyâre closed. Contrary to popular belief, apps can still track you even if you force quit them.
The key misunderstanding here is that force quitting an app is different from turning âBackground App Refreshâ off. Turning off âBackground App Refreshâ in your settings is the most surefire way to address all these problems.
Origins of the Myth
This myth seems to have originated on community forums in the days after the first iPhoneâs release. On July 5th, 2007, just a week after the iPhoneâs release, one user posted about their Safari application running in the background in Appleâs community forum.
âWhen you click the home button after you have been using Safari, is it still running in the background and draining the battery?â said the user.
âI am pretty sure EVERYTHING is running in the background,â replied another user.
There were many other community forum posts about this same confusion at the time, including one very popular post on Stack Overflow. However, itâs clear this misconception has occurred for many users since the beginning.
Why Itâs Pervasive
This myth, like others, is pervasive because it feels like it should be true. On a computer, having too many tabs or applications open can make it run slower. That much is true, but an iPhoneâs operating system is fundamentally different. Apps on your iPhone are meant to permanently stay open, able to be called up in an instant at any time. This distinction was never made clear by Apple.
Apple has never claimed that closing background apps improves your phoneâs performance. The company has always quietly maintained you should only force quit an application if itâs frozen.
But still, millions of people are wasting their days, and their batteries, closing their background apps. Itâs one of the most pervasive myths in technology, but we need to stop performing this iPhone cleansing ritual once and for all.
