Okay, total idiot question, I know. I'm new to apple and iphones. I love it and find it completely intuitive, but for the life of me, I can't close an app. I've got the new v4 phone with multi-tasking. I thought pressing the home button would close the apps, but when I double click home (because my battery drains so fast), I find I still have a few apps running. Even when I'm playing the iPod and click the home button it doesn't shut down. What am I missing - it must be obvious.
Apple manages the multi tasking so you don't have to.
Unless the app is streaming music once you click the home button the app is put into a frozen state (if it's updated for 4.0, if it hasnt been updated it is pretty much stopped and has to reload when you select it again) and will not use any resources. The app is not running anything in the background unless it's a music streaming app or VoIP.
If you still feel you need to manually quit something, once you double click home tap and hold the app you want removed from the multitasking bar. it will show a minus to remove it. press home again to reset
Apple manages the multi tasking so you don't have to.
Unless the app is streaming music once you click the home button the app is put into a frozen state (if it's updated for 4.0, if it hasnt been updated it is pretty much stopped and has to reload when you select it again) and will not use any resources. The app is not running anything in the background unless it's a music streaming app or VoIP.
If you still feel you need to manually quit something, once you double click home tap and hold the app you want removed from the multitasking bar. it will show a minus to remove it. press home again to reset
Double tap the home button to open the multi-task menu, then press and HOLD on an icon in the multi-task bar. This will make the icons jiggle like you were re-arranging icons on the home screen. Then tap the close button on each application you want to close.
As the other posters have indicated, you really don't have to worry about managing your open apps. The iOS on the iPhone does this all by itself. It might be hard to get used to coming from a desktop computer, but iOS is far more sophisticated in this regard.
If you are having battery issues, one thing you might try is going into your settings icon and turning off "Notifications" if they are on. Some people I talk to seem to get much better battery life with notifications turned off. You can always turn them back on. This setting tells the iphone to listen for messages for certain apps (like weather bulletins, news bulletins) that get displayed on your screen even if the app isn't running.
Some other people report that the battery charge indicator needs a few charge/discharge cycles to calibrate itself and show accurate readings. Don't know if that's true, but some people say their battery indicator seems to show more of a charge for longer periods of time after the first few charge/discharge cycles.
Also, sometimes apps misbehave and can cause unexpected problems. If you really really have trouble, you can always hold down the home button and sleep button at the same time for several seconds to turn your iPhone off and on again. It's really really rare to need to do that, but it can't hurt.
Thank you for the great information. I now know a) how to manually terminate an app, b) why that shouldn't really matter because it shouldn't suck battery life, c) what might be causing my freshly charged battery to be draining in 6 hours (notifications on), and d) how/why the whole thing acts that way from the Tidbits article attached.
Wow - great help. Now...if I can just figure out how to get those dumb ringtones I downloaded to iTunes installed I'll have absolutely NOTHING to complain about my journey to iPhone mania.
