Apple’s software SVP says quitting apps in the background does not help improve battery life

Somehow, it has become a part of mainstream culture for iPhone and iPad users to quit all their apps in multitasking as some kind of regular tech maintenance ritual to improve battery life or speed up the hardware. An understanding of how iOS multitasking works however, shows that this is completely unnecessary to close every app in the multitasking view frequently. red cloud A reader decided to ask Tim Cook for an official stance on whether he quits all his apps and if it’s necessary. Although Cook didn’t answer, Apple iOS chief Craig Federighi did with an unambiguous answer ‘no and no’ …

In the email shared with 9to5Mac, Federighi jumps in to answer Caleb’s question. The message headers have been verified for legitimacy. This is the arguably the strongest opposition from Apple executives on record in reply to the ‘quit all your apps’ superstition; Apple’s official support pages say that force-quitting should only be used on a case-by-case basis when an app freezes or misbehaves.

Tim Cook and other Apple executives do reply to customer emails from time to time, but this is the first time that another Apple executive jumped in and replied to the email.

Whatever the case may be, we have now heard from the horse mouth itself that clearing apps from running in the background has no effect in improving the battery life of your iOS device. Or do you think otherwise? Drop in a comment and let us know!

.

Why does quitting all your apps have no impact on iPhone battery life?

Quitting all your apps is clearly not supposed to be a thing, as it involves laboriously swiping up on tens to hundreds of individual app windows in the multitasking view. On a technical level, most of the apps are either frozen in RAM or not running at all, the system just displays them as a history for consistency. This is why the battery life impact is negligible.

Apps that do affect battery life are only things that actually do perform background operations, things like GPS navigation, background music playback and similar. However, you only really have these running when you are using them. As such, using force quit (swipe up gesture) should generally only be necessary when an app needs a hard reset as it has glitched or got stuck somehow.

Previously, 9to5Mac has reported on Tim Cook tipping Italian Siri ahead of time, how Eddy Cue rebutted anecdotes in Yukari Kane’s Apple book Haunted Empire, which suggested that Steve Jobs threw a pen at him amongst other instances. The emails from Apple execs phenomenon was most prevalent with Steve Jobs, who regularly replied to customer emails with short, curt, honest, responses on a variety of topics.

Thanks Caleb.