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Apple Reiterates: Force Quitting iOS Apps Doesn’t Help Battery Life
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On Android, developers don't need those cheats. Apps can run in the background and when they do, there is an icon for the app in the top of the screen beside the time. No hidden apps running in the background (there is a cheat sone apps use, transparent icon). It is up to the user if they want to let the app run in background or not.
Under iOS, it seems users are babysat by Apple.
Some apps certainly do drain the battery if left open in the background. Another one that comes to mind is Angry Birds 2. Facebook is another often mentioned. Point is there are popular apps out there that must be force quit to preserve battery. Giving a blanket statement saying it does absolutely nothing is self-serving at its heart.
How does that scale to dozens of apps?
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And do you think it is good app design if there is no way to use the app without having to force-quit it? Imagine you'd regularly have to force-quit an app because the app froze up. Wouldn't that be the apps problem and not Apple's problem (since it is hardly difficult to create apps that don't freeze up regularly and hardly difficult to create apps that don't use excessive power while in the background)?
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The approach that seems to imply that it is a good idea to force quit apps because one of them might sometimes misbehave.
Same as iOS, android will kill the oldest app if RAM is needed for the current app.
I set the camera app to 'only while using' which stops it from using location services when it's not being used, meaning only when it's actually being displayed on thee screen.
If I forget to close the Starbucks app (or other location based apps), I definitely see battery drain
There's an incredibly easy way to check your background battery drain. It's in settings under battery. Sure, certain apps, that do some sneaky things in order to stay backgrounded in ways that aren't supported by Apple may still cause background battery drain. Your average app doesn't need to be force quit, and never has had to, and that is likely how iOS will continue to operate. It's rather amazing how many people still insist, even on this page, that this isn't the case, by picking some very specific apps or cases that "prove" this statement wrong.
Android does it a bit different but the net effect is the same.
however......
With Android 5.x it was optional. With Android 6.x it is default.
however......
OEM's can turn it off by choice.
No, I'm not using Samsung's version of encryption.
Maybe, but the article doesn't really say what to look for, let alone, what to do if you find it. It's like a lot of other poor tech advice, it creates the impression that some problem exists that you should worry about, but without providing an actual solution. Why are so many people in the habit of swiping on the app picker? Bad advice.
Not sure what article you are talking about, but I don't see anything advocating just closing out apps or that something needs to be worried about.
Yes of course, but my point was, if you delete Mail's saved state, push emails still send notifications. The app hasn't been "quit" at all. In fact apps in iOS can't be quit at all, let alone, force quit.
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Same one. My point is it leads a reader to believe that they can figure out something that they almost certainly cannot, at least given the information they supplied, and probably not even with a whole lot more information. A much more useful piece of advice would be to tell users not to worry about this entire bogus issue.
The app has been closed, just the ability to receive notifications remains active, but, as pointed out, that can be turned off as well if desired, just separately from just closing the app.
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Of course it can help users invesigate if they suspect something might be off in relation to battery usage in some way, and it seems like we already covered that aspect it: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-reiterates-force-quitting-ios-apps-doesn’t-help-battery-life.1960549/page-6#post-22657242. That said, nothing there says people need to worry about things or look for problems or close out all apps just because (in fact it states a few times that isn't something useful to do).
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Not sure what you mean by "closed" but apps in iOS cannot be quit. Period. If they include background processes, those processes will run unless (1) they are processes the user is allowed to turn off or (2) the app is removed from the device. This is so readily provable I wonder why anyone would take the trouble to disagree.
If I run Tetris and then I swipe it to close it then it's closed. If I run Facebook and I then swipe to close it from the recent app list then it's closed. Those apps are not running or doing anything in the background or anything like that at that point.
I do wish that, once an app I'd dumped from memory, it would just leave multitasker though. I can't imagine any logical need or reason to swipe back three dozen apps to find what is effectively a screens hot of the app you loaded so long ago and have it effectively reload the app anyway.
I love multitasker particularly with the added ram as refreshes are reduced. But I don't see a point of being able to go back to the calculator that I loaded two weeks ago (as an example). I say all of this because your "kill all" comment got me thinking that I might actually appreciate a kill all feature, just to make things look a little tidier.
Jeeze, Craig capitalizes some words but forgets to do his own name?
He's a developer, I bet he writes his name in camel case craigFederighi but sometimes he just shorten it to craig
If an app is, as how they call them, a good citizen closing it doesn't help battery life and in fact forces the system to load it from scratch every time, consuming more resources.
Not all apps are well written, and some of them don't do the right thing when running in background. In those cases closing the app helps battery life, but for a few apps disabling background fetch is enough to avoid wasting resources.
To cut a long story short I agree with Craig, you don't have to bother about closing apps in background, but if you notice a constant battery drain it is a good idea to look for the guilty app and kill it.
Not all apps are well written, and some of them don't do the right thing when running in background. In those cases closing the app helps battery life, but for a few apps disabling background fetch is enough to avoid wasting resources.
To cut a long story short I agree with Craig, you don't have to bother about closing apps in background, but if you notice a constant battery drain it is a good idea to look for the guilty app and kill it.
If you actually read the article, you will see that what you say has already been debunked.
You are assuming that your quitting action is "free". But it is not. You are forcing the system to do some housecleaning, which 1) itself needs processing, 2) is absurd in the case of well-behaved (non-Facebook) apps that you might relaunch after a while: you kicked them out just to bring them in afterwards.
And in the case of annoying/malwarish apps like Facebook ;P, they have ways to try to come back anyway (geofences, background refresh, who-knows-what-next).
The problem I see is that once a bad player appears, like Facebook once more, then it's understandable that users get paranoic and try random things, even if it's still useless. Let's be thankful that there is no PRAM reset and Fix Permissions in iOS ;P.
Apple should really do something against the Facebook case; both closing those loopholes at the OS / App store level, and at the kicking-FB-out-for-a-while level.
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Don't worry, you might still learn a couple more things to help you make sense of it all.
It will only save battery life if you have granted the apps rights that they are abusing. For example, "Location services at any time" can be heavily abused and of course drain battery life. I use to set all of those to "When the app is running", and if that's not available and I don't really care for GPS accuracy in the app, just disable that altogether.
Or with Facebook, "Background updates" and notifications are known to drain battery life.
But generally speaking and assuming the apps are not abusing the API's, force closing them will not help. And if they do, there are better and less annoying options available at your disposal than keeping up with force closing them. Just take away all of their background rights and notifications. It will help. Force shutdowns is really not the best way of dealing with this. It's like keeping up with fixing things with duct tape rather than just fixing the problem in the first place.
Or with Facebook, "Background updates" and notifications are known to drain battery life.
But generally speaking and assuming the apps are not abusing the API's, force closing them will not help. And if they do, there are better and less annoying options available at your disposal than keeping up with force closing them. Just take away all of their background rights and notifications. It will help. Force shutdowns is really not the best way of dealing with this. It's like keeping up with fixing things with duct tape rather than just fixing the problem in the first place.
Supposing that the use API to allow requestWhenInUsePermission. If it doesn't and only support full access, you can't control it (other than rejecting access to location services). This is primarily a privacy rather than battery conserving setting.
In fact Facebook sucks the battery and runs in the background even with background refresh and push notifications disabled. They are clearly using all available methods to get CPU time in the background for whatever they do.