For many iPhone users, swiping up to close recently used apps has become second nature, assuming it improves performance and battery life. But that’s actually not the case, and I’ll explain why below.
When it comes to speed, completely closing all apps on your iPhone delivers a slower experience when they’re relaunched. The iPhone’s operating system is designed to manage CPU and memory resources on its own, optimizing apps to deliver a fast and responsive experience without the user even thinking about it. But when you force the operating system to close out every app, it doesn’t have the chance to optimize performance. Instead, the app is flushed out of system memory, meaning what you were doing and where you left off will be forgotten, and the app will have to reload all of its content instead of simply staying on standby.
While the term standby may evoke paranoia of wasted battery power, that isn’t the case. It’s how you turn your iPhone on and off, it’s technically on standby when you put it to sleep, but it uses less power compared to shutting down the device, waiting a couple minutes, and starting it back up again each time you use your phone.
Similarly, apps are designed to stay open in the background, and iOS is really good at managing their power consumption to prevent any background app from unknowingly draining your battery. In fact, sometimes background apps that appear to be open have actually already been removed from system memory and are technically completely closed. iOS simply continues to display it in the app switcher for the sake of convenience. But when you tap on the window, you may notice that the app completely reloads and you weren’t taken back to where you left off. That’s because iOS already closed the app for you, likely because it hadn’t been used recently.
So if manually closing apps don’t do any good, then why does the feature even exist? Well, it’s designed to be used for one purpose, to restart an app that’s frozen or isn’t behaving correctly. Sort of like if your iPhone suddenly freezes up, and you have to force restart the entire device. It’s a necessary troubleshooting measure that has to be included. But Apple tried making it difficult to discover, by hiding it from sight in the app switcher to prevent users from closing their apps unnecessarily.
If you want to continue swiping up to close apps on your iPhone just because it’s satisfying, I completely understand. Just know that it isn’t providing any functional benefit, while likely hurting battery life and negatively affecting performance.
