For many iPhone users, swiping up to close recently used apps has become a second nature assuming it improves performance and battery life but that’s actually not the case and this is why.
When it comes to speed, completely closing all your apps delivers a slower experience when they’re relaunched.
The iPhone’s operating system is designed to manage CPU and memory resources on its own, optimising 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 optimise performance instead the app is flushed off system memory meaning what you were doing and where you left off will be forgotten and the app will reload all of its content instead of simply staying on standby
And why the term standby may have evoked paranoia of wasting battery power, that isn’t the case.
Just think of 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 of 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 some background apps that appear to be opened 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 hasn’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.
So 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 tries to make it difficult to discover by hiding it from the side in the app switcher to prevent users from closing their apps unnecessarily.
If you want to continue swiping up to close apps just because it’s satisfying, just know that it isn’t providing any functional benefit while likely hurting battery life and negatively affecting performance.
