Many people with an iPhone (and that’s a lot of people) have the wrong idea about closing apps. And once you know why, it might change the way that you use your iPhone completely.
iPhone apps don’t need to be ‘killed’ All the time, I listen to people say that they close their iPhone apps when not in use with an upwards swipe in the app switcher (you know, the list of apps that appears if you double-tap the home button).
These people close their apps completely (rather than just exiting back to the home screen) in order to remove the app and stop it running, hopefully improving battery life in the process – as the phone has less to do, right? That all sounds great, except that pretty much none of those apps that you’ve been swiping up on are actually open.
They’re just images of apps that you have opened up before. You can think of it just like a list of graphical bookmarks for moving between apps. iOS, which is the mobile operating system that runs on iPhones and iPads, is intelligent enough to kill the open apps on its own, and it always has been.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t occasions when you should manually close an app, but generally there’s no need to force an app to close unless it’s unresponsive, says Apple.. “Some apps will run for a short period of time before they’re set to a suspended state”, Apple’s documentation states. “This means they’re not actively in use, open, or taking up system resources. When you return to these apps, they’ll open instantly”.
