One of the most common pieces of advice you’ll see for conserving battery life on iPhones is to close apps running in the background. Tips, hacks and experts alike have claimed that killing your apps regularly can give your smartphone the battery life boost it needs. According to Apple’s Senior Vice President of software engineering, Craig Federighi, that piece of advice is nothing but a myth.
An email correspondence between Federighi and Apple CEO Tim Cook was published by 9to5Mac. In it, a customer asked Cook: "do you quit your iOS multitasking apps frequently and is this necessary for battery life?"
In response to the email, which Cook forwarded, Federighi responded: “No and no.” Federighi’s reply should come as no surprise, since Apple’s support page clearly notes that "generally, there's no need to force an app to close unless it's unresponsive."
The general consensus for why this is the case is that most apps aren’t really running in the background, even though they show up in the multitasking view (when you double tap the home button). “After you switch to a different app, some apps run for a short period of time before they're set to a suspended state,” says Apple’s support page. “Apps that are in a suspended state aren’t actively in use, open, or taking up system resources.”
For those interested in conserving their battery, a report earlier this year from The Guardian found that uninstalling the Facebook app can save battery life by up to 15 percent. Users will not have to forgo using the Facebook app, as they can opt to use it on Safari.
“On average I had 15% more battery left by 10.30pm each day,” wrote Samuel Gibbs. “I had also saved space, because at the point I had deleted the Facebook app it had consumed around 500MB in total combining the 111MB of the app itself and its cache on the iPhone.”
