Closing background apps saves battery
iOS and Android use app suspension and intelligent background management to minimize battery drain. Manually force-closing apps and reopening them consumes more CPU and RAM than leaving them in their suspended state.
What we know
On modern smartphones, manually swiping away or force-closing apps in the multitasking view generally does not save battery, and can sometimes use more power than leaving apps alone. Both Apple's iOS and Google's Android are designed with sophisticated app-suspension systems that freeze background apps so they consume effectively no CPU or battery while not in active use, even though they still appear in the app switcher.
Apple's own developer documentation on app states describes how iOS moves inactive apps into a suspended state where they remain in memory but execute no code and consume no additional power. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said directly in a 2016 email exchange, later made public, that force-quitting apps does not help battery life and that iOS is built to manage this automatically. Google's Android documentation describes a comparable system of process states and adaptive battery management introduced in Android 9, which uses on-device machine learning to restrict battery use by apps a person rarely opens.
The counterintuitive part is that force-closing an app can cost more battery than leaving it suspended, because reopening a fully closed app requires reloading it from storage into memory from scratch, which briefly spikes CPU activity and power draw. If someone repeatedly force-closes and reopens the same handful of apps throughout the day, they may be creating exactly the repeated startup cost they were trying to avoid.
There are narrow exceptions. An app that is genuinely malfunctioning, using excessive location services, or stuck in a loop playing audio or refreshing data in the background can legitimately drain battery, and closing that specific app helps. Both iOS and Android provide battery usage screens in settings that show which apps are actually consuming power, and that data is a far more reliable guide to action than routinely clearing the app switcher. The habit of closing every app persists partly from older phone generations with weaker memory management and partly from an intuitive but mistaken belief that anything visible in a list must be actively running and draining power. Independent testing by tech publications that measured battery drain before and after habitually force-closing background apps found no consistent improvement, and in several test cases measured slightly worse battery performance due to the repeated cost of reloading apps from storage. Apple and Google both continue to recommend leaving the app switcher alone for typical use and instead directing attention to the battery usage screens built into both operating systems, which identify the small number of apps actually responsible for unusual power drain. Battery engineers who design modern lithium-ion power management systems note that the operating system's own scheduler is generally far better positioned than a user manually swiping through the app switcher to judge which processes deserve to keep running in the background.
Common claims
- Force-closing background apps saves meaningful battery life.Not supported
- Suspended apps in the app switcher use no significant power.Supported
- Reopening a force-closed app can use more battery than leaving it suspended.Supported