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Kill Apps on the multitasking doc

A

abz1981

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 3, 2011
1,013
4
Hi
does anyone here ever kill the apps that are on the multitasking docs on iphone 4 when not using them? Or do you just leave them on.

If you kill them is this mainly to help the battery life?

just wanting to see what everyones view is on this.

thanks in advance
 
Closing them will not help battery. Closing them does nothing but free up memory and forces the app to take longer to open next time you need it. It's really a waste of time to close apps.
 
grapes911 said:
Closing them will not help battery. Closing them does nothing but free up memory and forces the app to take longer to open next time you need it. It's really a waste of time to close apps.
Click to expand...

Oh thanks i was under the impression they helped the battery when you close them. Thanks for letting me know.

:)
 
Not true. Many apps do eat up battery including pandora, gps, and some games.

If you're jailbroken there is an app called "remove background". It gives you a one button toggle to close all apps in the taskbar.
 
I've said this in a lot of other threads:

If you close all the applications once in a while, it will improve the system performance and in the long run can save battery life. If you have 50 applications in "frozen mode" it can cause the phone to lag. Whenever a system is lagging more CPU is being used, causing battery life to decrease.

Others will agree with me and others will disagree. It works for me, my battery life is much greater when I close all my applications once in a while throughout the day.
 
I didn't know that you could kill apps on the multitasking doc. lol How is it done? I occasionally come across a nonfunctioning app that needs to be forced closed but I'd prefer a faster way than doing the power + home method.
 
the phone can definitely slow down and lag a bit with a ton of apps frozen in the background. It should not consume battery though. Closing apps down every once and a while is not a bad thing and can improve the speed of your phone a bit. There have been many times when my phone is a little laggy and I hit the remove background button (Im jailbroken) and notice the lag decrease.
 
Even if pandora is running but not streaming music it affects battery life.

And as the poster above mentioned, there us a noticeable performance hit when the phone has less than 50 Mb ram available.
 
grapes911 said:
Closing them will not help battery. Closing them does nothing but free up memory and forces the app to take longer to open next time you need it. It's really a waste of time to close apps.
Click to expand...

This is also the very same reason you should not use a task killer on an Android phone.

The whole idea behind it, was created wrongfully, by a unskilled developer a long time ago that didn't know what he was doing.

He noticed these apps running in the background on his newly acquired Android phone. He arbitrarily decided they must be using up his battery (even though he could not substantiate it) and that's how tasks killers for Android got started.

Most people simply fail to realize that just like iOS is substantially different from Windows 7 that you run on a PC, Android is completely different that iOS or OS X for that matter.

I never kill tasks on either my iPhone 4 or HTC Inspire. In the case of either, even it they were drawing a bit of power it's so little that a mere minor reduction in display brightness is more than enough to compensate. Just like on a laptop, the biggest consumer of power is the display.
 
UCLAKoolman said:
Even if pandora is running but not streaming music it affects battery life.
Click to expand...
No it does not. iOS does not allow it. Only certain APIs can be used in the background. Unless you are using one of those APIs, such as streaming music, the app sits in memory. It has no noticeable effect on battery.
 
a lot of mixture of opinion here on this question. My phone is not jailbroken. plus i dont seem to notice any lags with applications either.
 
Here is some supporting information. This is a blog entry from chpwn. If you are unfamilar with him, he is one of the top iPhone jailbreakers and there are probably very few people outside of the Apple that know more than him about the iPhone.

I'll highlight some of the parts that are relevant:

When you exit an app on previous versions of iOS, unless it was one of Apple’s built in apps, it generally exited immediately. Now, in iOS 4, the app generally stays in RAM. This does not mean the code is running, in general, it does not. The app is “suspended” in memory, ready to quickly resume when you open it up. There are a few exceptions, though, to that rule:
. . .
There’s no reason to ever manually close an application: if more resources are needed, the system will close the least used one for you. You might not even notice this: the difference between resuming a suspended program, and starting it anew is small, and according to Apple, is supposed to be as small as possible. Free RAM is no longer an indicator of system performance: rather, less free RAM means your phone will feel snappier when switching apps. It’s counterintuitive, but it’s true.
. . .
I don’t believe there’s a need to even see if an app is even running. Closing applications is a useless waste of time; if something needs to be closed, the OS will manage that. In fact, I don’t believe there is ever a reason to know if something is running or not. Switch to an app when you want to use it, leave it when you are done.
Click to expand...

If anyone wants to close their apps, then fine. If you think it helps your phone, saves battery, speeds up your phone, or whatever, then do it. I personally think it's the placebo effect, but it's your phone. I'm not going to tell you how to use it. I'm going to follow both Apple's and chpwn's recommendation on this and just use my phone. I've never closed an app and I have no issues. Things consistently run great.
 
I have never closed an app (except when I first got the phone last June, to try it out) and i have never noticed any lag, battery life issues, etc. It ran great the first time I turned it on and it is the same speed now. Apple has taken care of all the technical stuff concerning multitasking. Just use your phone and don't worry about it.
 
Clear when needed

It's been my experience that sometimes when my iPhone 4 is low on RAM, and I have multiple tabs open in Safari, the tabs have to refresh as I switch between them; closing out my multitasking bar fixes this until I fill it up again. I would recommend that if you notice a performance decrease, close out some apps. Background apps may not be using CPU cycles directly, but safari having to reload tabs everytime I switch among them certainly does. Also, be selective when closing apps, quitting iPod causes it to lose my place in any podcasts I'm listening to.

I'm curious to know the usage patterns of those that seem to have problems with multitasking and those who say don't worry about it. A restart, for example, as I understand will close out all those apps, but their icon will remain in the multitasking bar.
 
ozred said:
This is also the very same reason you should not use a task killer on an Android phone.

The whole idea behind it, was created wrongfully, by a unskilled developer a long time ago that didn't know what he was doing.

He noticed these apps running in the background on his newly acquired Android phone. He arbitrarily decided they must be using up his battery (even though he could not substantiate it) and that's how tasks killers for Android got started.

Most people simply fail to realize that just like iOS is substantially different from Windows 7 that you run on a PC, Android is completely different that iOS or OS X for that matter.

I never kill tasks on either my iPhone 4 or HTC Inspire. In the case of either, even it they were drawing a bit of power it's so little that a mere minor reduction in display brightness is more than enough to compensate. Just like on a laptop, the biggest consumer of power is the display.
Click to expand...

It draws more power to restart the app but having a bunch of apps in the dock will make your phone laggy. If you have SBsettings you can tell how much ram is being used and whenever I have a bunch of apps open I have around 50MB free. When everyting is closed i have around 300-350 and my phone is a lot snappier. I hope Apple addresses this issue and adds a gig of ram to the new iphone, which I'm sure they will.
 
BlackViper said:
It's been my experience that sometimes when my iPhone 4 is low on RAM, and I have multiple tabs open in Safari, the tabs have to refresh as I switch between them; closing out my multitasking bar fixes this until I fill it up again. I would recommend that if you notice a performance decrease, close out some apps. Background apps may not be using CPU cycles directly, but safari having to reload tabs everytime I switch among them certainly does. Also, be selective when closing apps, quitting iPod causes it to lose my place in any podcasts I'm listening to.

I'm curious to know the usage patterns of those that seem to have problems with multitasking and those who say don't worry about it. A restart, for example, as I understand will close out all those apps, but their icon will remain in the multitasking bar.
Click to expand...

I've done it all. I use to shut it off every night which would wipe the ram clean of course. Never had issues. Now, I leave it on for weeks at a time and still, it never lags. You are correct about Safari tabs. They have a lower priority w/in the OS so if iOS has to choose between kicking a safari tab out of ram or kicking angry birds....it will choose the tab.
 
Simm0nS777 said:
anyone who says theyve never experienced any lag on their phone what-so-ever either got the best phone ever created or is in denial.
Click to expand...

Actually you would be surprised when both benchmarking as well as comparing side by side. While I've never claimed that there is absolutely no effect, it's so very small there's no reason to obsess over it. Like any other topic of technical nature it can be argued forever, yet the bottom line is always the same. We are individuals with different perspectives and preferences. Both iOS and Android do a very good job in this area. Therefore it's very nice to be able to choose the one you like and just enjoy it. At least for me, I cannot imagine not having one of each. The technology is fascinating and the user experience is wonderful.
 
Ive noticed that if I try to surf the net while too many apps are open, my internet connection is slower than usual.
 
grapes911 said:
If you are actively using GPS or streaming music, of course it's consuming battery. Stop streaming music or cancel your route. No need to close the application.
Click to expand...
Google Latitude continues to ping your location if it's on in the background. Flicking the options on and off is less practical than just killing the app when you don't want your location streamed.
 
I close most apps except for 3 to speed up my iphone. It's simply because the task manager can only show 4 apps at a time, and it takes a while hunting through icons to find the right app.

Also, the new version of skype definitely drains battery when backgrounded, but it didn't always do this.
 
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