Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Reiterates: Force Quitting iOS Apps Doesn’t Help Battery Life
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Personal experience: I'm in the habit of quitting apps after I've used them. I regularly get close to two days of use out of my iPhone 6 before having to recharge it. My wife doesn't quit apps and she gets about a half-day maximum out of her iPhone 6. The only difference in our usage habits (besides quitting apps) is that she occasionally uses Facebook and I don't. I would be surprised if the phone took that much of a hit just from FB.
I disagree. I must quit *some* apps to retain a decent battery life on my iPhone 4. Google Authenticator is an example. If I leave it running in the background, my battery life is cut in half, easy. My two banking apps are other examples. When they are left running, battery life is degraded. Those are probably faults of the apps themselves, but quitting solves the problem for me.
He's not wrong. There may be the occasional app that misbehaves, and force quitting that particular app could help improve battery life in that particular situation. But to offer up habitually force quitting apps to people as a solution to battery life issues is false and misleading.
If you use the same 3-5 apps most of the time, like most people, and you are force quitting them every time you should just be pressing the home button to close them, then you are actually draining your battery and wasting your time as you have to relaunch the app into ram and use the processor to do it every time you subsequently open it.
Force quitting apps is a terrible, misguided habit. It gives people the false impression they have to be system administrators for their iPhone, while simultaneously giving them a poorer experience using it.
This is one feature I can't stand about iOS. While I am confident that apps suspended in the background are not necessarily consuming battery life I can't stand the idea of going to the app switcher view and seeing every app that I have ever used on iOS hanging out there. Seriously some app that I used once 6 months ago should not be shown in the app switcher even if it not going to consume even one tiny fraction of extra battery. Having to sit there an swipe shut every suspended app that I have ever used is absolutely ridiculous.
Simply put a time and count limit on the apps shown in the app switcher. Only show the last X apps used in the last Y amount of time. If I open up more than X apps, then the least accessed and oldest app is removed from the app switcher view. This doesn't mean the app loses its current state, just that you have to access it by "launching" from its icon. Any open app that hasn't been used after Y amount of time should just disappear from the app switcher.
NOBODY uses the app switcher to go back to an app they suspect they used once a year ago possibly sometime, they simply relaunch the app from its icon. Just restore its previous state and end this ******** by keeping it shown indefinitely on the app switcher.
I think fixing this stupid concept this will address a lot of the FUD around the app switcher and people thinking all these apps are consuming battery in the background. Personally the idea of having to "manage" the app switcher is one of the dumbest features that Apple ever implemented and someone with half a brain at Apple needs to re-engineer this feature as they have done it WRONG on iOS and now TVOS and OS X.
Simply put a time and count limit on the apps shown in the app switcher. Only show the last X apps used in the last Y amount of time. If I open up more than X apps, then the least accessed and oldest app is removed from the app switcher view. This doesn't mean the app loses its current state, just that you have to access it by "launching" from its icon. Any open app that hasn't been used after Y amount of time should just disappear from the app switcher.
NOBODY uses the app switcher to go back to an app they suspect they used once a year ago possibly sometime, they simply relaunch the app from its icon. Just restore its previous state and end this ******** by keeping it shown indefinitely on the app switcher.
I think fixing this stupid concept this will address a lot of the FUD around the app switcher and people thinking all these apps are consuming battery in the background. Personally the idea of having to "manage" the app switcher is one of the dumbest features that Apple ever implemented and someone with half a brain at Apple needs to re-engineer this feature as they have done it WRONG on iOS and now TVOS and OS X.
I conducted some testing myself and this seems to be accurate.
- Disabling Background App Refresh <- does nothing
- Disabling Notifications (these could trigger the app to run at any time) <- does nothing
-> Facebook grabs 5-10% Battery life when used like 5 minutes during the day.
- Killing FB in Multitasking switcher directly after use + Disabled Notifications + Disabled Background App Refresh: FB uses 0% Battery Life in Background... overall down to ca. 2% with my specific usage pattern
I never force quit apps (unless they are misbehaving) and I use FB more than occasionally and I get 2 full days out of my iPhone 6.
Maybe the battery in her iPhone is defective? I would go have it checked by a Genius. Only half a day for "occasional use" of Facebook on an iPhone 6 is not normal.
Are you using the same phone carrier? A low cell tower signal can be a huge battery drain.
The "app quitting" myth will never die if even the article claiming to debunk the myth insists on using the term "quit" to describe what happens when you drag the app out of the picker. The app is not quit, you are deleting its saved suspended state. It's something iOS does automatically as needed even if the user never intervenes. You are likely not killing any background processes either, since apps that run many background processes will continue to do so after the saved state is deleted. If you refuse to believe it, try "quitting" Mail and then sending yourself an email from another device. Ding.
All that being said, if any given app honks up and become unresponsive, deleting its saved state is often the solution.
All that being said, if any given app honks up and become unresponsive, deleting its saved state is often the solution.
so what that Apple exec is really
He also used a smiley! Really unprofessional. Where's Tim?
Jeeze, Craig capitalizes some words but forgets to do his own name?
He also used a smiley! Really unprofessional. Where's Tim?
How do you know it uses 5-10% of your battery life?
The battery stats in Settings can be misleading as it only indicate the percentage of time an app was used (in the foreground or background), not how much battery it actually used.
If an app is said to have been "active" 3 hours in the background it doesn't mean the CPU ran at 100% for 3 hours, it could have been using only 0.01% of the CPU in the background for all you know.
Edit: I'm wrong that the percentage indicated is related only to the time the app was active. It does seem to be an estimate of the amount of battery drain, but I suspect it's not super precise.
Last edited:
Same service in the same location. (Actually, at her work she gets a stronger signal than I do at mine.) I probably should have her check her background app refresh settings. That might be a culprit. Mine are turned off.
source? I don't believe this is true. If this was the case the feature would be completely useless.
Very limited tasks are allowed to run in the background and usually the tasks you do want to run in the background, don't, while the ones you don't, do. For example, I want tools like SSH/telnet, RDP, VNC, FTP, IRC, etc. to run in the background on iOS but they get suspended in the background then killed after 3 minutes. One of the major reasons iOS is nowhere near a PC replacement.
* 7 minutes for iOS 6 and older, 3 minutes for iOS 7 and newer
http://www.speirs.org/blog/2012/1/2/misconceptions-about-ios-multitasking.html
* 7 minutes for iOS 6 and older, 3 minutes for iOS 7 and newer
http://www.speirs.org/blog/2012/1/2/misconceptions-about-ios-multitasking.html
Last edited:
But if you have background app refresh enabled, and you have apps that use location services, and leave them open, will your battery life suffer more than if you had force closed them?
It would seem to me that if you're not sure about whether an app is draining your battery in the background, that it is safer to close those certain apps (or apps in general) to eliminate this potential factor.
Last edited:
It will, they'll just pull a page from BlackBerry's book and release it at a time when Apple is no longer relevant.
well the UI of the App Switcher doesnt help. how is a normal person (as in none MR readers) supposed to know that those Apps arent running. everyone grew up and being taught the other way around. if u see an app in there which u used a while ago everyones mother is gonna think it is still running
Starting and stopping applications increases the probability of your iOS device life span getting shorter is the most ignorant claim I've read in Computer Science.
OS design wise, I think this is true.
However, some developers just find ways around this to keep their app alive for the most insignificant reasons.
Good thing you can tell the apps that's been draining the battery in the settings app, sad thing is probably most users don't know.
However, some developers just find ways around this to keep their app alive for the most insignificant reasons.
Good thing you can tell the apps that's been draining the battery in the settings app, sad thing is probably most users don't know.
If you have background app refresh enabled yet quit apps all the time, maybe you don't need/want background app refresh and should disable it?
That's actually how it works prior to iOS 9 from what I can tell. It only showed "active" time, but not percentage of battery usage, if memory serves me right. I remember thinking that when iOS 9 came out, we finally have a "battery usage" section that actually gives us useful information on precisely how our battery is being drained.
Any application that has memory leaks whether active or passive using location services and other system wide services w/o the need of your direct interaction drains the life of the battery charge, period. Craig didn't address any of this in his email and as a former colleague of his I'd love to debate Thermodynamics with him, seeing as he has no background in it.
The debate should begin with respect to the obsession with thin and the fact the battery capacities in iOS devices aren't extending themselves in any impressive ways. They've targeted an 8-9 hour single charge window and expect people [studies proving peaks of use per day drop well before this length] to recharge after.
If they produced a battery of 12 hours it would be impressive, but it wouldn't stop the people who want more from complaining ad nauseum. It's a move the goal post fruitless obsession.
However, so is the obsession with thin. Form factors are done. The system has reached a zenith in design and now it's about incremental refinements from here on out. It's now all about internals.
What is the purpose again? I would assume it allows apps to do their background tasks, that are built into the app by the developer. If background app refresh is disabled, then what feature is turned off? Is that simply like the Weather app can't update 'every hour' and instead needs a manual pull. Same goes for mail? Or does mail have it's own mechanism, regardless of background app refresh?