It’s good to know how to close apps on iPhone for those times when an app is acting buggy or becomes unresponsive. It’s really easy — just swipe up to see your running apps and swipe up again to close them.
But does this mean you should always quit your open apps? No, not at all.
Despite what you may have heard, quitting apps on iOS usually makes things worse, not better. It’s a myth that quitting apps will save battery life, make your iPhone run faster or free up memory. Overall, it negatively impacts your iPhone’s performance.
Here’s how to close iPhone apps — plus five reasons why you shouldn’t rush to do it.
How to close apps on iPhone — and why you probably shouldn’t
To close apps on an iPhone, you first need to open the App Switcher, which shows previews of recent apps you can tap to switch between.
Depending on your iPhone, the method to open the App Switcher differs. On an iPhone with Face ID, swipe up from the bottom of the screen and pause near the middle. For iPhone models with a Home button, double-click the Home button to open the App Switcher instead.
Once there, swipe left or right to look through your apps, then swipe up on an app’s preview to close that app and remove it from the list.
If an iPhone app you’re using becomes unresponsive or buggy, this will reset the software and might solve the problem. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to have the bad habit of force-quitting all the open apps on their iPhones every time they use them.
You might start doing this, thinking that you’re saving your battery or boosting your iPhone’s performance. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Nonetheless, do this enough times and it becomes habitual. But here are five reasons you shouldn’t — and why quitting iOS apps does more harm than good.
5 reasons you shouldn’t close your open iPhone apps
Closing your iPhone apps all the time is counterproductive and goes against the way that iOS, the operating system that your iPhone runs, is designed.
Let’s review five reasons for this.
1. Apps Don’t Run in the Background
It’s a common misconception that every app in the App Switcher is currently running in the background and thus using your iPhone’s resources, but this isn’t true. Apple’s support page on switching iPhone apps states the following:
After you switch to a different app, some apps run for a short period of time before they’re set to a suspended state. Apps that are in a suspended state aren’t actively in use, open, or taking up system resources.
Thus, most of the apps that appear in the App Switcher don’t represent active processes. They appear in the switcher more as a matter of convenience (letting you switch back to apps you were using earlier) than as a list of all running processes.
The App Switcher is not like the Task Manager on Windows or Activity Monitor on a Mac. You don’t need to close apps manually to stop them from running.
2. Your iPhone Manages RAM on Its Own
This point continues from the above. iOS does a great job of managing the resources available on your device, and by closing apps all the time, you’re forcing it to work harder.
Like any computer, your iPhone has a limited amount of RAM, which it uses to store running processes. iOS regularly removes apps from RAM when they aren’t needed so that there’s always space available for new apps you launch.
Apps you haven’t touched for some time are automatically closed; when you open them later, they start up again. You can observe this yourself: open the switcher and scroll from left to right to reach an app that’s buried deep in the list. When you tap it, the app likely won’t pick up where you left off, since it was suspended a while ago to make room for apps you’re using now.
For apps that you stopped using recently, iOS freezes them, then unfreezes them when you reopen, to let you resume them quickly. You might not even realize that the app was frozen when you open it again, because this happens quickly.
When you force-quit an app, you’re stopping iOS from managing processes for you and losing the advantage of having frozen apps immediately available.
3. Closing Apps Forces Them to Reload
If you make a habit of closing iPhone apps, you’re making any apps you use often less convenient.
Let’s say you’re texting your friend in Messages and swipe to close the app after each response. Every time a new message comes in, you have to open Messages and select the conversation with your friend again. It would be faster to just leave Messages open so you can return to that conversation as soon as you unlock your phone.
While this isn’t a massive time difference, it adds up over the course of a day. But it’s not just time–this will also negatively affect battery life. By forcing your phone to close apps and then reopen them all the time, it has to do more work than if you just left them open.
Imagine turning off your phone every time you put it back in your pocket, then having to turn it back on when you needed it again. This would be inefficient and waste power–and it’s exactly what you’re doing on a smaller scale with swiping to close apps.
4. Closing Apps Makes the App Switcher Less Useful
The App Switcher becomes less useful when you constantly swipe all your apps closed. The point of the switcher is making it easy to access apps that you just had open. When it’s always empty, you have to launch apps through your Home screen or Spotlight search every time.
This wastes your time, especially for apps that aren’t on your primary Home screen or Dock.
5. Apple Says It’s Unnecessary
If you aren’t convinced by all of the above, perhaps confirmation from Apple itself will change your mind.
The lack of a Close All button on the App Switcher implicitly speaks to how Apple intends this feature to work. If the company recommended closing all your apps regularly, it would likely make this easier to do with such a button.
Apple’s support page on how to close apps states that "you should close an app only if it’s unresponsive." If closing apps all the time helped your iPhone, Apple would make this clear.
Finally, in 2016, 9to5Mac shared an email that someone sent to Tim Cook, asking if closing iOS apps frequently is a good idea and necessary for battery life. Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior VP of Software Engineering, replied with "No and No."
Obviously, the person who heads up the design of iOS has a good idea of how it works.
When You Should Close iPhone Apps
You should only close apps on iPhone if an app is buggy or unresponsive.
Once you learn how to close iPhone apps, you might mistakenly think it’s good for your phone to do it all the time. For the reasons outlined above, this is definitely not the case. Force-quitting your apps doesn’t save your battery or speed up your iPhone — it actually depletes your battery and slows down your phone.
When you finish using an iPhone app, just swipe up to return to the Home Screen and don’t worry about it.
