I always believed that force closing apps was good for your iPhone until I recently found out that it’s only recommended when an app is “unresponsive”... it’s now a habit I’m having a hard time breaking, please help.
iPhone SE, iOS 12
It’s not harmful other than the phone will actually use a little more battery power because once you have force close an app, it has to relaunch all over again when you use it again, whereas if you don’t close an app and leave it a suspended state, it doesn’t use as much power to wake it up from the suspended state.
Unless an App is misbehaving, there is absolutely no reason to force close it. In most cases doing so, will use more battery power to restart the app than to leave it suspended. At this moment I have 32 Apps showing in my “recently used”, with no ill effects.
If you mean going to the app switching screen and sliding an app up and off the screen, you're not force closing it. What you're doing is no different than pressing Command+Q on your Mac to close an open app. Though you can still call it force closing if the app is in the middle of an operation and you close it anyway.
The only caveat I would add to the already posted remarks, is sometimes I close apps that force you to allow background updates. If you don't want the app phoning home to "the mothership" force closing them is the only way I know of of stopping it.
Thanks for that bit of information. I didn't know that.
Actually, closing the app won't stop it from updating, because the app will reload if it receives a notification or update event, but won't show up on the list of open apps. If you don't want this to happen you must disable the app in Settings/General/Background App Refresh.
Is it bad to force close apps?
