Apple has confirmed that closing open apps on your iPhone isn’t necessary unless they’re unresponsive.
You might glance at your carousel of applications and feel overwhelmed by the number, but it’s actually fine to leave them as they are.
Contrary to popular belief, having numerous apps ‘open’ doesn’t slow down your iPhone or drain the battery faster. In fact, closing and reopening apps can impact your battery life negatively. Apple advises only closing apps if they malfunction; otherwise, it’s best to leave them alone.
Apple explains:
“When your recently used apps appear, the apps aren’t open, but they’re in standby mode to help you navigate and multitask
“You should force an app to close only if it’s unresponsive.”
The misconception that fewer apps mean longer battery life stems from the misunderstanding that apps visible on the ‘carousel’ are actively running, which they’re not. They’re merely suspended to conserve resources while you use other functions on your device. Tech journalist John Gruber further explains that closing apps can be detrimental to your battery, as background apps are effectively ‘frozen’ and consume minimal energy.
Gruber explained:
“Apps in the background are effectively ‘frozen’, severely limiting what they can do in the background and freeing up the RAM they were using. iOS is really, really good at this.
“It is so good at this that unfreezing a frozen app takes up way less CPU (and energy) than relaunching an app that had been force quit.
“Not only does force quitting your apps not help, it actually hurts. Your battery life will be worse and it will take much longer to switch apps if you force quit apps in the background.”
Gruber went on:
“If you’re worried that background apps are draining your battery and you see how quickly they load from the background, it’s a reasonable assumption to believe that they never stopped running.
“But they did. They really do get frozen, the RAM they were using really does get reclaimed by the system, and they really do unfreeze and come back to life that quickly.”
So, don’t fret about the number of apps running on your iPhone; they’re not draining your battery as much as you might think.
