He he he. Apple only makes apps for other platforms when they will make money (apple music)from it unfortunately they would lose iphone and ipad sales if they did this. Unfortunately.
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Apple Reiterates: Force Quitting iOS Apps Doesn’t Help Battery Life
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He he he. Apple only makes apps for other platforms when they will make money (apple music)from it unfortunately they would lose iphone and ipad sales if they did this. Unfortunately.
Understood, and very good information in your latter paragraphs! Funny that you say "respect to the obsession", like we're supposed to bow down to their holy thin cravings - but I completely agree with having "average" battery life as being satisfactory and therefore not a priority. It is in fact something that has been resolved very much so to begin with by offering the iPhone +, which caters towards power users, whom of which usually require/complain more often about additional battery life in general!
Mad Mac Maniac
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It's not an exception for Skype, it's an exception for VOIP phone calls. Sadly, I've seen discussions where app developers recommend registering the app with the VOIP API's just so that the app can stay active in the background even though it will never receive a VOIP call by design. I hope Apple is watching for this type of abuse. I like my battery power to be used by honest apps.
Does anyone at MacRumors actually use Apple products or know anything about them? Force Quitting is a very specific function in OS X for quitting an app that has frozen, crashed, or is otherwise unresponsive. This article, conversely, is about simply quitting an app in iOS instead of letting it stay open in the background.
Using "Force Quit" in this context makes no sense.
Good thing this is incorrect because that is not possible with the VoIP background API (like how they do with the BG Audio).
Unless there is a channel that is actively piping information to the iOS device, the app will be suspended. The app is always suspended after it hands off the channels for iOS to watch and it is up to iOS to resume the app when those channels light up.
The battery section in settings will tell you if the app is using background services to drain your battery and you can turn off background app refresh for that app.
You should really only force quit an app if it freezes or is having a performance issue of some kind. It will clear the app from memory so that when you open it again you'll have a fresh start.
It is important to distinguish between the design and the reality. Apple has created a design that ALLOWS for apps to work well in the background without sucking power. But that design assumes app authors know what they are doing and care, and sometimes that's not true.
Notorious examples are
- Skype, which constantly drained battery rapidly until I stopped using it in disgust a year ago, so I've no idea what it's like today
- Facebook (so people say, I don't use it much and never on iPhone)
- the app called GPS Navigation (which offers off-line maps, which are useful when you're going to visit a foreign country and don't have data in that country. Apart from that feature, the app is pure garbage, and destroys battery like there is no tomorrow.)
All three seem to insist on doing something different to break the rules. Skype is obviously not handling VoIP connectivity properly. Facebook seems to be far too chatty. GPS Navigation insists on not using the Location APIs the way Apple intended. The one common thread seems to be incompetence coupled with utter lack of pride in the product being shipped.
All three (again, Facebook I don't know, that's from hearsay, but definitely Skype and GPS Navigation) are absolutely best treated as toxic waste --- launched, used for as short a period as possible, and then immediately terminated. It's a shame it has to be this way, and maybe Apple should prevent such apps from being allowed in the app store, but that is the reality today.
The indicated usage time surely doesn't represent the percentage of battery used, but you're right that the % displayed should.
So I updated my post :
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.
So I guess my point is moot, but I still believe the % stats are a rough estimate and a few % difference doesn't prove much, especially since your experiment wasn't very scientific and there could've been some other variables that affected the battery usage.
What a bunch of horse poop about the memory usage.
On my iPhone 6 Plus, there are times where I'm jumping between 2 tabs in safari and every time I switch tabs the tab will refresh.
When I close all other apps in my app switcher, guess what, the tabs in safari don't refresh anymore when switching back and forth.
On my iPhone 6 Plus, there are times where I'm jumping between 2 tabs in safari and every time I switch tabs the tab will refresh.
When I close all other apps in my app switcher, guess what, the tabs in safari don't refresh anymore when switching back and forth.
Hmm. Ket me quote from the site MacRumors (you may have heard of it...)
"Second, the app was using silent audio to keep FlexBright running in the background, a frowned-upon tactic that can result in battery drain. Late last year, the Facebook app for iOS was using excessive battery life, something caused in part by a silent audio component."
https://www.macrumors.com/2016/03/09/apps-adjusting-display-temperature-not-allowed/
Every API can be abused...
Apple appears to view engineering as a business of compromise and balance, trying to get everything working well with no one aspect of the product overwhelming everything else. Unfortunately you get developers who insist that their shiny is the most important thing in the world --- more important than security, more important than battery life, more important than usability --- so to hell with compromise and "appropriate" use of the hardware or OS facilities.
You are right, background app refresh enables app to update their content in the background when they receive a special push notification to do it. The app is still limited in what it can do in both time and scope.
If you often force quit an app it disables background app refresh until a relaunch, negating the need for this feature.
Simply disabling background app refresh would remove the need to force quit this app in the first place.
In a perfect world I agree with Apple on this one. But in the real world there are some poorly written apps, looking at you Facebook, that do drag down the battery in the background. I also have experienced the issue right after a new version of iOS, when developers haven't ironed out all of the bugs of their apps running with the new version yet.
Please let me know how accurate you think that thought is. I guarantee my Note 5 is every bit as secure as my 6S+.
According to my experience, that is something that still count for me, force closing apps doesn't help battery life but help speeding up apps, especially with 1 Gb devices.
It's true: iOS is doing the same for me, but I'm more efficient than it in doing so
I agree. When I had an iPad 3, force closing large apps like Pages and Numbers helped improving speed in Safari and some other apps.
Not sure about a difference in battery life...but in performance...Definitely! Whenever my 6s+ seems to take forever to execute something (e.g. Load a webpage, Go to the next screen in an App), I go into App Switcher and low and behold I have 5 or more Apps open. I flick them close and surprise...my iPhone is fast and responsive again! So, to me there is a performance difference.
It may not help battery life but stopping and restarting the app a few times a day consumes precious processor cycles thereby affecting battery life
1. I didn't hear about the Facebook battery drain issue, even if you turn off the background app refresh. I wonder if this has any relation to the data spikes I've seen. I had to upgrade to 6 GB of data from 4 GB, even after I turned off the background app refresh.
2. I've always turned off the apps by swiping them away, since we could first do it. I find that sometimes an app gets stuck and the quickest way to fix it is to swipe it closed and reopen it. I doubt I will stop doing this.
3. I've recently taken on the practice of going to Airplane mode for a moment to force my phone to reconnect to either the cellular or the wifi network. I noticed there are times when the phone is slow to figure out where I am. I might go from one wifi network, to cellular, to another wifi network within a few minutes. I find that if I make this quick pass thru Airplane mode, my phone responds better with internet based apps, especially Safari.
4. I turned off that WiFi assist feature, since I had data usage issues. Ever since I got the iPhone 6 Plus and especially the iPhone 6S Plus, my data usage has increased tremendously, but I don't think my iPhone usage has really changed.
5. I also keep Bluetooth off to save battery.
6. I periodically like to be a janitor with my phone by swiping closed all the apps, clearing my Safari cache and restarting my iPhone with the soft reset. Sometimes I do both the soft reset and turn the phone totally off. I find that especially after updates or new apps are installed, the phone seems to like to be restarted. I rarely use a newly installed app without first soft resetting my phone.
7. Sometimes, when I am being a janitor with my phone as outlined in #5, I soft reset my phone and discover that all the apps I had swiped closed are back. What's up with that? Sometimes they stay closed and sometimes they are back like I never swiped anything closed.
2. I've always turned off the apps by swiping them away, since we could first do it. I find that sometimes an app gets stuck and the quickest way to fix it is to swipe it closed and reopen it. I doubt I will stop doing this.
3. I've recently taken on the practice of going to Airplane mode for a moment to force my phone to reconnect to either the cellular or the wifi network. I noticed there are times when the phone is slow to figure out where I am. I might go from one wifi network, to cellular, to another wifi network within a few minutes. I find that if I make this quick pass thru Airplane mode, my phone responds better with internet based apps, especially Safari.
4. I turned off that WiFi assist feature, since I had data usage issues. Ever since I got the iPhone 6 Plus and especially the iPhone 6S Plus, my data usage has increased tremendously, but I don't think my iPhone usage has really changed.
5. I also keep Bluetooth off to save battery.
6. I periodically like to be a janitor with my phone by swiping closed all the apps, clearing my Safari cache and restarting my iPhone with the soft reset. Sometimes I do both the soft reset and turn the phone totally off. I find that especially after updates or new apps are installed, the phone seems to like to be restarted. I rarely use a newly installed app without first soft resetting my phone.
7. Sometimes, when I am being a janitor with my phone as outlined in #5, I soft reset my phone and discover that all the apps I had swiped closed are back. What's up with that? Sometimes they stay closed and sometimes they are back like I never swiped anything closed.
Using the term "quit" in the context of iOS makes no sense, since a user cannot "quit" an iOS app (forced or otherwise).
I beg to differ. I close my apps nearly every time i lock my 4S and hardly ever do i get slowdowns (more than the normals for a 4S on iOS 9) and in the event my phone does slow to a crawl, i just clear the ram and it's back to normal.
In all honesty, my 4S runs iOS 9 pretty well. Battery isnt the best, but i make do. My charging case also comes in handy.
I close out apps to free up RAM and it keeps the phone running fast and smooth. Safari in general is a tremendous resource hog so I'll keep it closed out fully when not in use and my battery thanks me.