How to stop apps from running in background on Apple Watch Series 5

Unfortunately, watchOS 10 doesn't offer granular control over background app activity like newer versions do. However, you can try a few workarounds to help minimize the impact of background app activity on your battery life.

One approach is to disable Background App Refresh for certain apps on your iPhone that are mirrored on your Apple Watch. By doing this on your iPhone, you may indirectly reduce the background activity of those apps on your Apple Watch as well.

To disable Background App Refresh on your iPhone:

1. Open the Settings app on your iPhone.

2. Scroll down and tap on "General."

3. Tap on "Background App Refresh."

4. Here, you can either toggle off Background App Refresh for all apps or selectively disable it for specific apps by toggling them off individually.

Since watchOS 10 doesn't offer direct control over background app activity, this method might help mitigate the issue to some extent. Additionally, you can also try minimizing the number of apps installed on your Apple Watch to further reduce background activity and preserve battery life.

If these steps don't provide the desired results, reaching out to Official Apple Support for personalized assistance tailored to your specific device and software version might be the next best step. They can offer further guidance and troubleshooting tailored to your Apple Watch Series 5 running watchOS 10.

Double pressing the Digital Crown will bring up all apps you recently opened. Swiping them to the left and taping on the white cross will remove them from that list.

On my Apple Watch 5, I had the background refresh disabled for all listed apps. No issues with the use of those apps and it saved a lot of the battery life.

tmgrl4 wrote:

I find tips all over the forums and how to turn off apps running and background and none of them work on my Apple Watch five I believe it's a special edition. All I'm allowed to do is delete them turn some off completely know how to get them out of the background, since they are eating up power, how do I do this?

The only thing you need to do is turn off background app refresh. Force quitting them, as Ingo2711 explained how to do, is only necessary if the app is misbehaving. Apple has never recommended this. In fact, force quitting will most likely end up using more battery as it takes more power to re-launch an app than it does to unsuspend it.