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Other Do you tend to close your apps, or leave them running in the background?

Do you close your apps after using them, or leave them open in the background?

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The Cockney Rebel

The Cockney Rebel

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Nov 16, 2018
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I have always closed an app, after using it.

However, I’m now leaving apps “open” in the background, to see if this makes any difference to performance etc.

Apparently, iOS is good at memory management, so leaving apps “open” in the background is actually better for battery life & performance etc.

What do you do?
 
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Since iPhones don't have much RAM it doesn't make a big difference. If you open an app and there is not enough free RAM then some app must be terminated by the operating system to make room. If you switch back and forth between only a small number of apps then they might all remain open.
 
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I used to close any app I used, but a few years back I just decided, "I don't care." I don't use many apps to begin with (maybe 4-6 and half of those are stock apps) and it's a bother to close them.
 
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the premise is flawed. As @Helmsley posted, there is no need to close you apps. They are “running” in the background. Unless they are playing audio or using GPS, they will be suspended by the OS and the restarted if you reopen them. That is why most people don’t close their apps as shown by your survey.
 
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As an iOS software developer I know I should force close the apps that heavily consume battery in the background, or the ones that are not responding, and leave the others open
 
Vref said:
If I’m not using it, it doesn’t need to be using system resources
Click to expand...
If you're not using it, it’s not using system resources. That’s the entire premise of multitasking on iOS. When you leave an app, the app has a short timeframe (~30 seconds) to complete any tasks it needs to run before effectively being paused. When you reopen the app, it’s resumed.

When you force-close the app, the entire app must be loaded once you come back to it instead of merely the state in which the app was last used, which is much slower and ultimately more resource-intensive, as counterintuitive as it might seem.
 
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jonblatho said:
If you're not using it, it’s not using system resources. That’s the entire premise of multitasking on iOS. When you leave an app, the app has a short timeframe (~30 seconds) to complete any tasks it needs to run before effectively being paused. When you reopen the app, it’s resumed.

When you force-close the app, the entire app must be loaded once you come back to it instead of merely the state in which the app was last used, which is much slower and ultimately more resource-intensive, as counterintuitive as it might seem.
Click to expand...

Would there not be a benefit in reloading?
 
I normally leave them open, and only close them when they start chewing up battery life (like a few days ago when I lost ~70% battery overnight).
 
I just leave them all open. I only close them if the app is not working how I want it to work. Other than that, I don’t see a reason to close them.
 
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iPhone battery life roughly on par w android which utilizes real multitasking.

I have to wonder how inefficient ios is under the hood if android can fully run apps in the background and ios cant. You see this most obviously doing google drive uploads that freeze after the app is backgrounded for a period of time whereas android runs continuous file uploads.

Curious situation.
 
I leave my seven regularly used daily apps open all the time. The only ones I close are any others I use temporarily for a specific task and then don’t need to use again for a while.
 
I only close apps on android to free used memory but for iOS I leave them open since iOS manages memory usage in a different way... Others even say closing iOS apps is not good for the battery...

Sidenote, Yandex browser puts the recently used tab first like android and iOS puts the recently used app first... If only Safari does the same thing then maybe I will use it more since I can have Adguard app block ads on both browsers... For now, until other browser engines are allowed on iOS, I'll just have Safari as my default browser then Yandex on android...
 
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