“Potentially millions of people are wasting time, battery and finger energy on an entirely unnecessary and perhaps unhelpful exercise, every single day,” Andrew Griffin reports for The Independent.iPhone users are busily swiping away apps to force them to quit when there is no need to at all.”
“Experts have warned yet again that there is hardly ever any need to force quit apps – done by double tapping the home button and then flicking the apps up and away – despite the fact that it is common practice,” Griffin reports. “The latest round of warnings came after Apple pundit John Gruber wrote a blog post warning people that there is no need to flick the apps away.”
“The practice of swiping away apps is based on a misconception about how iOS works on iPhones and iPads, he said. And not only is swiping away apps unnecessary, it might even be counterproductive,” Griffin reports. “People might presume that it’s important to quit apps to stop them taking up memory or battery while they are sitting in the background. But that’s wrong.”
Read more in the full article here.
“That’s not how iOS works,” Gruber writes. “The iOS system is designed so that none of the above justifications for force quitting are true. 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.”
“There’s an entire genre of YouTube videos devoted to benchmarking new phones by running them through a series of apps and CPU-intensive tasks repeatedly, going through the loop twice. Once from a cold boot and the second time immediately after the first first loop,” Gruber writes. “Here’s a perfect example, pitting a Samsung Galaxy S8 against an iPhone 7 Plus. Note that no apps are manually force quit on either device. The iPhone easily wins on the first loop, but where the iPhone really shines is on the second loop. The S8 has to relaunch all (or at least almost all) of the apps, because Android has forced them to quit while in the background to reclaim the RAM they were using. On the iPhone, all (or nearly all) of the apps re-animate almost instantly.”
“An awful lot of very hard work went into making iOS work like this. It’s a huge technical advantage that iOS holds over Android,” Gruber writes. “And every iPhone user in the world who habitually force quits background apps manually is wasting all of the effort that went into this while simultaneously wasting their own device’s battery life and making everything slower for themselves.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Force quitting apps in iOS is only for extraordinary circumstances when an app is misbehaving, not something to be done on a regular basis.
So, as we’ve been saying since 2010, if you’re doing it, just stop.
Seriously.
Don’t worry, not all of these apps are “running.” In fact, most of them are not. Those 42 apps are the last 42 apps you used, they’re not churning in the background, sucking up your battery life. Think of them sort of like Han Solo encased in carbonite; they’re in suspended animation, so they spring back to life right where you left them when tapped. So, that app list is there for your convenience, not to stress you out, so don’t worry, be happy! … Your iPhone is taking care of multitasking, so you don’t have to. — MacDailyNews, June 28, 2010
Still not convinced? Take it from no less than the ultimate authority:
Just use [iOS multitasking] as designed, and you’ll be happy. No need to ever quit apps. – Steve Jobs’ email, June 29, 2010
SEE ALSO:
Apple’s software SVP: Quitting multitasking apps in iOS not necessary – March 10, 2016
Steve Jobs on iOS multitasking: ‘Just use it as designed and you’ll be happy’ – June 29, 2010
Why is my iPhone 4 running 42 apps? Don’t worry, it’s not – June 28, 2010
