Force Quitting Apps Can Help You Save Battery

It’s commonly believed that exiting an app without force-quitting it will continue to drain your battery — and even hurt your phone’s performance — as it’s still working in the background.

Luckily, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The iPhone manages its resources very well. Very few apps are allowed to run freely in the background, and those that can only do so when you’re actively using them, such as listening to music or using a GPS navigation app.

For nearly every other app, your iPhone handles everything by suspending apps almost as soon as you close them. Apps are allowed to keep running in the background for a few minutes to finish up things like syncing your data, but iOS will forcibly suspend them if they take too long.

Technically, force-quitting apps might do more harm than good and have a more negative impact on your battery. When you close an app normally, it remains suspended in memory in whatever state you left it in. When you force-close an app, you’re flushing it out of memory, which means that when you reopen the app, it has to reload everything from scratch, running additional processes that might consume more battery life.

So, unless an app is acting weirdly, there’s no reason to force close it every time you’re done with it. Just swipe up to return to the home screen and carry on.