Apple phone users have been warned to stop closing their apps – or risk damaging their battery. Written on the Apple Community page of the company’s official website, it’s been warned that the common mistake is actually a “myth.”
In the warning, the iPhone user stresses that it’s a “common belief that you should close apps running in background to improve performance and save battery life. Unfortunately, this is a myth that is not true in almost all situations”.
The iPhone guru explains that the only time you should close apps in the background is if it’s “misbehaving” or if it’s “using energy (as per Settings/Battery) and you don’t need it at the present time”.
The reason he says never to close apps in the background unless they’re not working is because these apps are not actually “running in background” and instead they are simply “suspended”. In addition to this, there is no benefit to it and it hinders your battery life.
He explains: “It actually worsens battery life, because it takes more energy to load an app than to restart it from the ‘multitasking’ screen. It does not make your phone faster (it actually makes it slower, because it takes longer to initialize an app from storage than to restart it from a suspended state).”
He also says that there’s no benefit to the phone’s memory either stressing that closing the app not only uses more battery – something we need to avoid if we want to keep our phones for longer.
In fact, tech experts at 9to5Mac say that Apple’s Craig Federighi, senior vice president of Software Engineering who reports to CEO Tim Cook, told them: “Apps that do affect battery life are only things that actually do perform background operations, things like GPS navigation, background music playback and similar.
“However, you only really have these running when you are using them. As such, using force quit (swipe up gesture) should generally only be necessary when an app needs a hard reset as it has glitched or got stuck somehow.”
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