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Apple Executive Confirms: Manually Quitting Apps Doesn't Improve Battery Life (bgr.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Apple software engineering VP Craig Federighi recently dispelled one of the more long-standing myths about iPhone battery life. In short, if you spend a few minutes every day double clicking the iPhone home button and manually closing up applications in an effort to maintain battery life, you're wasting your time. The reality is that the applications you see upon opening up the multitasking pane are actually nothing more than static images intended to represent a list of your most recently used applications. Apple support documents have indicated, "generally, there's no need to force an app to close unless it's unresponsive." Apple support docs further explain: "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."
This is for regular apps. Apps that have background mode enabled can run in background and can consume CPU cycles. They can even use GPS, WiFi, LTE etc. That consumes battery. Most of the running or GPS apps run just fine in background. Otherwise they'd just stop recording once the screen locks or, worse, keep the screen on at all times.
Which the OS will automatically free up as necessary by killing off suspended processes. Why waste your own time doing it when it offers no real benefit and the OS will free up the memory as soon as it needs it anyhow?
It's kinda funny, actually. The reason the iPhone didn't originally support mutli-tasking is battery life. Now that it does support it, even after going through the extremes they have to keep it lightweight, people still preemptively kill battery hoggish apps.
Apple did try to warn us.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
This is one of those instances where they forget that there are some apps that actually do continue in the background and that they are really popular.
That such a major player as Facebook writes such a shitty awful resource hogging app frankly shocks me...
It should not shock you. Big companies write some of the worst apps. If a small company makes a crappy app, they are out of business. But a big company doesn't have much at stake. So they design by committee, and their coders and QA are not even on the same continent. I have an Amazon Echo, and their Alexa app is one of the worst I have ever seen. Every time it wakes up, it spends several minutes spinning the "pinwheel of death" ... just to display the shopping list. Then while I am getting the orange juice, it goes back to sleep, and I have to wait again before I can get the next item. It is so painful to use that I just open the list once and copy it onto a piece of paper.
Everyone is listing off apps that do suck cpu cycles. So apple is wrong about this. So is google. We keep getting these explanation from these vendors which doesnt seem to match real world experiences. Thats because vendors use imaginary scenarios, static apps that dont use resources like gps, cpu or network in the background, which is fine for a game, but reporting apps use cycles.
Google goes even farther and says task killers DECREASE battery life, because the task killer will run often. Total bullshit, but as its easy to test and see the results.
I think think the vendors are using unrealistic use cases, apple and google thinks the average use will just call/text and brows the web, so all other apps are a "rare" thing so its excluded.
Stallman gets a lot of shit but, more often than not, he's right. People laugh him off because he presents very stark predictions of a dystopian future that is in sharp contrast to what one sees at any given moment. I think he understands The Slow Boil that we are currently experiencing while the majority of society just sees a shiny toy and covets it.
Horsesh*t. Or rather, Stalman Foot-cheese.
Stalman was talking about software. You' can change your system image on your phone. You can even make one yourself if you want to. You can make your own apps that work the way you want. And for those who aren't so fanatical, they're free to stick with stock system images that come with that all-important support (even if it's less than 2 years in most cases - it's not like it stops working after support ends).
If everyone did it Stalman's way, small cheap and smart smartphones wouldn't exist. "Everything should be open" - well, no manufacturer is going to put the big bucks into r & d making a product that anyone else can just legally knock off. Thus there would be no economies of scale, and too many hardware and software incompatibilities.
Them's the facts. Or do you want to go back to the time of home-brew computers, and a slew of different architectures and operating systems with software only available on any one particular system in a hit or miss fashion? It was fun, but it was also a bit of a PITA.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Why not go all the way and just uninstall it completely.
Then check it once daily from a laptop... then once weekly, then go 6 months go by and you realize you haven't checked it, and your life isn't any less full. You log in and see a grotesque display of human narcissism, drama, separated by advertising and more advertising and then logout again never to return...