Why do Apple Geniuses recommend killing apps manually?
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Thanks for those links. It's right there on Apple's website.
"Note: It's typically unnecessary to force an app to close unless the app is unresponsive. You can view all recently used apps by double-clicking the Home button. These apps aren't open; they are in a suspended state."
The question is: Why is Apple's recommendation in the store different? And the reason I care is because when I tell my family they don't need to do that... and the Apple store tells them they do... then they do and are concerned with always closing their apps instead of just using the phone and enjoying it they have to manage it constantly.
"Note: It's typically unnecessary to force an app to close unless the app is unresponsive. You can view all recently used apps by double-clicking the Home button. These apps aren't open; they are in a suspended state."
The question is: Why is Apple's recommendation in the store different? And the reason I care is because when I tell my family they don't need to do that... and the Apple store tells them they do... then they do and are concerned with always closing their apps instead of just using the phone and enjoying it they have to manage it constantly.
Infinus.gold
macrumors regular
It does manage memory for background apps properly....
descent apps + powerful OS = great experience.
..
i am sure you are running apps that are not ported/ modified for iOS 7.
you should memory & cpu monitoring app and check stats..
you will be surprised to find how much poor apps people develop.
It goes on further to say they aren't/won't use battery either....
I guess it could be like the above mention Facebook app and it's permissions. Since there are so many apps it's easier for a genius to tell people to close them all.
I think there is a certain placebo effect like mentioned above by another member too.
I try to use the recent app list exclusively. Once you get used too it keeping the few apps you use constantly in it is much easier to access. I close the rare app that's in it just to keep it clutter free.
NT1440
macrumors P6
Correct.
I think the best way to think about this is this kind of advice is essentially technology old wives tales, where whether or not it is necessarily true, the information still finds its way into the mainstream.
Case in point, how many "IT guys" were still out there at services like GeekSquad were still telling people well after windows vista that it was best practice to defrag your hard drive every few months (in fact I was shocked to find that GeekSquad Folders still actually say this)?
Yeah that's definitely a good example about defraging. I guess my surprise is that this is coming from Apple themselves about their own product.
If they expect users to kill apps to keep the system running optimally then they should go all the way- enable full, true multitasking and we'll manage it ourselves.
If they expect users to kill apps to keep the system running optimally then they should go all the way- enable full, true multitasking and we'll manage it ourselves.
NT1440
macrumors P6
I think we have a misunderstanding of how things translate to retail help desk services. At the end of the day its getting the customer moved along, with as big a smile as possible. Its not that Apple HQ wants users to manage apps, their entire OS is very clearly designed that users don't need to think about management at all unless an issue arises.
That mission, however, is a big tough to pull off explaining day in and day out in a retail setting for an employee so you see these kind of "go-to" answers that get people satisfied with something that sounds close enough to the truth. Retail models, especially ones as busy as an apple store, has a wearing effect on the quality of advice given as employees go throughout their day.
The biggest factor, for me personally, was trying to get across the facts to clients whom clearly were haven trouble understanding. Sometimes its best to rephrase complex operations into easy "best practices" that are easier to understand and have the added benefit of reducing the likelihood of running into issues. The "kill the apps" advice is personally what I think is going on here from the perspective of a former "genius-like" retail position.
Hope that helps a bit.
PNutts
macrumors 601
typ·i·cal·ly : generally or normally
Notice Apple didn't say "It's unnecessary to force close an app...". But this is a religious argument. Some folks say it isn't necessary. Other folks have a better experience closing them. I clear the recently used app list at the end of the day. There's a reason the developers of memory intensive apps recommend that you restart your phone if their app fails to load.
jabingla2810
macrumors 68020
Such a shame to tell customers to do this.
My girlfriends mum got an iPhone, and as the geek of the family I set it up and showed her how to use it.
I never showed her how to close apps, and I stressed at the time, "This isn't like your PC, just use it and it looks after itself."
For 6 months she used it happliy, never once had a problem with it.
Then a Tech Support guy at work got talking to her and noticed her iPhone, and filled her brain with "PC crap"
Now she "fully" closes all apps after using them, turns off WiFi when leaving the house instantly, turns it back on when getting to work (15 minutes away), has her screen brightness way down because shes become paranoid over battery life (Which never concerned her before), she's gone into the deep parts of the settings app and disabled all sorts of location information because she's been told it uses GPS which uses battery. (It doesn't use GPS but even explaining that doesn't matter)
Point is, she LOVED her iPhone for those first 6 months, she had a great experience, now she manages her iPhone.
A shame really.
My girlfriends mum got an iPhone, and as the geek of the family I set it up and showed her how to use it.
I never showed her how to close apps, and I stressed at the time, "This isn't like your PC, just use it and it looks after itself."
For 6 months she used it happliy, never once had a problem with it.
Then a Tech Support guy at work got talking to her and noticed her iPhone, and filled her brain with "PC crap"
Now she "fully" closes all apps after using them, turns off WiFi when leaving the house instantly, turns it back on when getting to work (15 minutes away), has her screen brightness way down because shes become paranoid over battery life (Which never concerned her before), she's gone into the deep parts of the settings app and disabled all sorts of location information because she's been told it uses GPS which uses battery. (It doesn't use GPS but even explaining that doesn't matter)
Point is, she LOVED her iPhone for those first 6 months, she had a great experience, now she manages her iPhone.
A shame really.
irnchriz
macrumors 65816
Even if you swipe the apps away it does not necessarily mean that you fixed a crashed/rogue app or process. Although it doesn't seem to be of as much of an issue as before a combination of apps all open together can cause odd behaviour from the OS. For example I remember having this issue with apps doing weird stuff when I had Facebook running.
Anyhoo, the way to close a misbehaving app on iOS 7 is to hold down power till the swipe to turn off comes up, then hold home till it kicks back tho the home screen. This also fixes issues with the built in apps like mail etc if they start misbehaving.
Anyhoo, the way to close a misbehaving app on iOS 7 is to hold down power till the swipe to turn off comes up, then hold home till it kicks back tho the home screen. This also fixes issues with the built in apps like mail etc if they start misbehaving.
thirdeyeopen666
macrumors 6502
As a former Genius for five years, I can tell you that a lot of bad info gets spread around and repeated back to customers. This is due to Apple's over-zealous promoting of people who show the desire to be "technicians" rather than promoting the ones who show actual technical aptitude.
GlenK
macrumors 68000
Agree and the same thing I do. It's no big deal to close them. I leave the few I use regularly open and that's it.
That's essentially force quitting an app. Certainly useful at times, but usually pretty much only when the regular quitting (closing) doesn't work for some reason.
cwosigns
macrumors 68020
Not entirely true. A few times my phone's data connection stopped working. It said I had LTE, but I was getting no data. A power cycle did not fix it. So I went into a Verizon store and told them what was happening. The guy closed all of my apps, restarted, and voila! My phone had data again. That was back when I was on iOS 6; it hasn't happened that I can remember in iOS 7. But I've made a habit of going through and closing all apps about once a week.
I share the OP's frustration over this, it annoys me to see people peddling this on the Internet but when I brought a rebooting iPhone 4S into an apple store a couple of years ago and got told the same nonsense about their being "too many apps open" I couldn't believe my ears.
I had many smartphones before my first iPhone (the 3G) and they all suffered from the PITA that was "multitasking" on very limited resources, which meant constantly dropping into task managers and shutting down apps to preserve the 5 minutes of battery life these crappy devices offered. I was one of the few that actually appreciated the complete lack of multitasking in the first versions of IOS and never having to worry about background apps, and when it was first announced that multitasking was coming I was quite worried they were going to ruin the simplicity of the OS, but was happy to see Jobs and others extol the management-free nature of it, and the smart way that IOS took care of it's own background processes. That is absolutely the way that any OS should be in my opinion but especially a battery dependant mobile one.
So to see people ignoring this and getting obsessed by constantly shutting down apps is a great shame, and to hear a "genius" use this as a lazy and frankly insulting placebo to move people with real problems along and out the door is really aggravating. In my case, I told the genius that he was flying in the face of Apple's own advice and sure enough the reboots (with very specific panic.plist error reports) persisted and on my next trip to the store I got a new phone.
To this day I never shut down apps unless they're obviously misbehaving, and have never had a problem with battery life or performance, even with 7. I believe it's possible for a rogue, poorly developed app to affect these things in the background, but the trick is to identify that shonky app and get rid of it, not waste your time trying to the OS's job in managing tasks.
I had many smartphones before my first iPhone (the 3G) and they all suffered from the PITA that was "multitasking" on very limited resources, which meant constantly dropping into task managers and shutting down apps to preserve the 5 minutes of battery life these crappy devices offered. I was one of the few that actually appreciated the complete lack of multitasking in the first versions of IOS and never having to worry about background apps, and when it was first announced that multitasking was coming I was quite worried they were going to ruin the simplicity of the OS, but was happy to see Jobs and others extol the management-free nature of it, and the smart way that IOS took care of it's own background processes. That is absolutely the way that any OS should be in my opinion but especially a battery dependant mobile one.
So to see people ignoring this and getting obsessed by constantly shutting down apps is a great shame, and to hear a "genius" use this as a lazy and frankly insulting placebo to move people with real problems along and out the door is really aggravating. In my case, I told the genius that he was flying in the face of Apple's own advice and sure enough the reboots (with very specific panic.plist error reports) persisted and on my next trip to the store I got a new phone.
To this day I never shut down apps unless they're obviously misbehaving, and have never had a problem with battery life or performance, even with 7. I believe it's possible for a rogue, poorly developed app to affect these things in the background, but the trick is to identify that shonky app and get rid of it, not waste your time trying to the OS's job in managing tasks.
PicnicTutorials
macrumors 6502a
I don't care how many times I hear this. When I close out my apps my device becomes more responsive. It has been proven to me so many times it is fact. It is extremely apparent on older devices. My sons get all my old iPhones and iPads that become game machines. One second they are so slow they mine as well be frozen. After closing out all the apps it becomes usable again.
I owned all those older devices, from the 3G onwards, and - respectfully - I disagree that your referencing "fact".
The fact is that all versions of IOS were designed to manage their own background processes without user intervention, and that's certainly how I used them without ever having to worry about responsiveness.
Sounds like this mostly comes down to theory vs. practice--in theory one thing is mostly applicable, while in practice, while the theory should be applicable, and usually is, at least for some, if not even quite a few, a somewhat different thing can often be applicable (for one reason or another).
I'm not disputing your claim because I have no basis or proof to say otherwise. And there can always be a certain app that's bypassing restrictions. However according to Apple it shouldn't make a difference and in my experience it hasn't. I never close the apps on my iPad and performance is no different with no apps or tons of apps in the recent app list.
I can't show this without making a video so I'll just suggest it. If you download a memory app like Memory Free (don't know if that one in particular is still available in the App Store) you can watch apps be closed by iOS even if they are in the recent app list. At that point that app in the list is just a place marker. You may even notice or at least read complaints that the picture of the app isn't up to date or completely blank, that's because it's closed. Clicking on it will start the app from scratch.
Here is an example. I'm in tapatalk right now. If I open memory free I can see that app in RAM, then if I open the camera app and take a picture, then go back to memory free tapatalk isn't there. If I then open recent apps and goto tapatalk it will start off as if it was being opened for the first time.
In practice there are misbehaving apps that don't comply with the theory and can mess things up.. But I maintain the solution is to weed them out and replace them if you encounter those sorts of issues, not get into some pointless daily routine of shutting down a hundred perfectly functioning (and mostly completely inactive) apps just to work around that one bad egg.
Septembersrain
Cancelled
Closing apps frees up RAM. Without RAM, a phone will eventually shut off. I close apps manually when I notice my phone coming to a crawl. Unlike with android, I can't use a back button to close an app. This is my only way outside a full reboot.
Why do Apple Geniuses recommend killing apps manually?
Nope. IOS manages its own ram and shuts down apps long before lack of memory comes anywhere close to affecting the system. Your iPhone will NEVER "shut off" due to having too many apps open, because IOS will never leave more than a few apps open under any circumstances. This isn't my opinion, it's fact.
The majority of apps you think you're "closing" in the app manager are actually dead already, frozen in a completely passive state. All you're doing is removing them from a list of recent apps, and freeing up virtually zero ram.
If your phone is "slowing to a crawl" there's either something wrong with it or, more likely, you have one or two rubbish apps that are causing you specific problems. Do some detective work and get rid.
Nope. IOS manages its own ram and shuts down apps long before lack of memory comes anywhere close to affecting the system. Your iPhone will NEVER "shut off" due to having too many apps open, because IOS will never leave more than a few apps open under any circumstances. This isn't my opinion, it's fact.
The majority of apps you think you're "closing" in the app manager are actually dead already, frozen in a completely passive state. All you're doing is removing them from a list of recent apps, and freeing up virtually zero ram.
If your phone is "slowing to a crawl" there's either something wrong with it or, more likely, you have one or two rubbish apps that are causing you specific problems. Do some detective work and get rid.
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PicnicTutorials
macrumors 6502a
There must be some reason why developers can't make a Screencast app for ipad. That would be super cool but is nonexistent.