Swiping Away Apps = Saving Battery, Or Is It? | by d'wise one | Chip ...

Swiping Away Apps = Saving Battery, Or Is It?
iOS has been built to intelligently manage memory, so you don’t have to!
Are you one of those people who swipes away apps on your iPhone or iPad with the notion that you’re ‘closing’ these apps to preserve battery?
Well, if you are, you’ve been making the wrong move since… let’s say for ever!
When you go to the ‘app switcher’ (by double-clicking the home button) with the premise that you’re now done with the app and should ‘rid it’ as killing the app will improve performance, but if you really think about it, it does the exact inverse.
Don’t worry you haven’t been committing a crime, and you could very easily be forgiving since Apple’s own employees are doing it!
Now we ponder over the question: why would a person start to develop this notion in the first place?
The answer lies in the simple fact that applications on the Desktop computers (that we’ve all be bred and brought up on, ever since we began our journey with computing), work in a similar fashion and one is bound to make a logical leap that perhaps a similar benefit ensue on smartphones.
You start to think why something is displayed as open when it is in fact not. Then comes the conclusion that perhaps the app is not closed but actually working, if so then it must be feeding on your device’s processor and thus you need to close (read: swipe) it away.
The reality is, Apple while known for it’s devices and hardware, is actually a software-first company; no… that’s not true. They’re actually a customer-experience-first company. And knowing how small devices’ (even) smaller batteries die quickly, they’d already backed in an auto-ignore functionality, that marks unused apps and services as dormant, and feeds them no power, nor computing capability (not even Background Processes, to a large degree!).
So, because of the way iOS is designed, there’s no reason to swipe apps away routinely. Doing so might even have the counter-productive to what you’re aiming to accomplish!
The app switcher is more of a “Recently Used Apps” menu, it is not an accurate representation of the apps that are, in effect, running in the background. Each of the pictures shown in the switcher is really just that — an image that signifies what has been opened recently.
When an app is closed on an iPhone or iPad, it is put into a kind of suspended state where the operating system takes a picture, a static image if you may, of everything it’s doing at that moment. The suspension in effect merely preserves the apps, and so keeps them from using up the battery or performance that many people presume they do. This process also enables you to switch between recently used apps as they were at the point of last usage — giving the appearance that the apps have been working away in the background all that time.
So, Why Shouldn’t You Kill An App?
On most instances, when you do shut down an app, you force it to a point of reset. That way when you use the app again, the phone has to go through the process of memory allocation for commencement all over again — this in turn, decreases the efficiency of your device.
Another thing for you to know — Unlike on old-world PC configurations, there’s nodisadvantage to having your RAM filled up. iOS can, and will remove an app from memory if you haven’t visited it in a while, if you need more memory for something else. Letting iOS manage this on its own apparently is the best way of going about things.
There’s no reason you’d want to have completely empty memory, as that would just slow everything down later!
You should periodically to go to Battery in the Settings menu to check the full usage of battery by certain apps and how long they have been operational over days or weeks, if you do find something that isn’t right it is better to kill off that app.
All in all, the practice of swiping apps is not what it has been made out to be so far.
Apple itself has told people to stop swiping away. The company said in official documents that “there’s no need to force an app to close unless it’s unresponsive”, and Apple’s head of Software, Craig Federighi tweeted earlier this year in an attempt to shut down the pervasive myth.
If you want to save battery life and prevent apps from running in the background, the place to do it is in the Background App Refresh screen not the switcher where you used to swipe them away.