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."

Comments

Re:Waze

[MightyMartian]

And Facebook, an app that just eats cycles and battery life on both iOS and Android. That such a major player as Facebook writes such a shitty awful resource hogging app frankly shocks me... until I remember iTunes on Windows.

Re:Waze

[pr0fessor]

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.

Re:Waze

[EvilSS]

And Facebook, an app that just eats cycles and battery life on both iOS and Android. That such a major player as Facebook writes such a shitty awful resource hogging app frankly shocks me... until I remember iTunes on Windows.

Facebook was actually caught cheating once by playing inaudible audio to prevent iOS from putting it into sleep.

Re:I don't think this is 100% true

[radish]

Apps which are put to the background are allowed to run for a little while to let them finish up what they were doing (e.g. saving something). Then they're suspended - their state is written to disk and they're flushed from memory. The screenshot is saved so you can see it in the list, and if you reopen it the app will be restarted from the saved state.

Apps can register themselves as requiring to run full time in the background, examples are navigators, messaging apps, etc. These will not be suspended, and can eat the battery. If you add one of those flags to your app without actually having justification to do so, you'll be rejected from the app store.