How To Keep An App Running In The Background Iphone

double press home to open recent apps

Despite what you lot may have heard, closing apps on your iPhone or iPad won't speed it up. But iOS does permit apps to run in the groundwork sometimes, and you can manage that in a different way.

This myth is actually harmful. Not only will it slow downward your use of your device, but it could utilise more bombardment power in the long run. Just exit those recent apps alone!

The Myth

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The myth states that your iPhone or iPad is keeping recently accessed apps open and running in the background. To speed things up, you need to shut these applications like you would on a calculator. On earlier versions of iOS, this was achieved by double-pressing the dwelling house button and borer the X on recently accessed apps.

On current versions of iOS, this can be accomplished by double-pressing the home push button and swiping recently used apps to the acme of the screen, where they're removed from the multitasking view. You can besides swipe up with four fingers on an iPad to open up the switcher.

This Can Fix Frozen Apps

Swiping an app up and off the multitasking screen quits the awarding and removes it from memory. This can actually be convenient. For instance, if an app is in a weird frozen or buggy state, just pressing Home and then going back to the app once again may not aid. But visiting the multitasking screen, quitting it with an upward swipe, and then relaunching the app volition force it to start from scratch.

This is how you can forcibly quit and restart an app on iOS, and it works if y'all ever need to exercise that.

You lot Don't Desire to Remove Apps From Memory

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Withal, this won't actually speed up your device. The apps you meet in your list of recent apps aren't actually using processing ability. They are consuming RAM, or working memory — but that's a adept thing.

As nosotros've explained before, it'south skilful that your device'south RAM is full. There'southward no downside to having your RAM filled up. iOS can and will remove an app from memory if you haven't used it in a while and you need more than memory for something else. It'southward best to let iOS manage this on its own. There'south no reason you'd desire to take completely empty memory, as that would just ho-hum everything downward.

These Apps Aren't Running in the Background, Anyway

The reason for this misunderstanding is an incorrect agreement of how multitasking works on iOS. By default, apps automatically suspend when they become into the groundwork. So, when you leave a game you lot're playing by hitting the Home push, iOS keeps that game's data in RAM and so you tin can speedily go back to it. However, that game isn't using CPU resources and draining the battery when yous're away from it. Information technology's not actually running in the background when y'all're not using it.

When yous use an application on your desktop PC — Windows, Mac, or Linux — or open up a web page in your web browser, that code continues running in the background. You may want to close desktop programs and browser tabs you're not using, but this doesn't utilize to iOS apps.

How to Actually Prevent Apps From Running in the Groundwork

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Some apps do run in the groundwork thanks to iOS's recent improvements to multitasking, however. A feature called "groundwork app refresh" allows apps to check for updates — for example, new emails in an email app — in the background. To prevent an app from running in the background in this fashion, you lot don't need to apply the multitasking view. Instead, just disable background refresh for such apps.

To practice this, open up the Settings screen, tap General, and tap Groundwork App Refresh. Disable groundwork refresh for an app and information technology won't have permission to run in the background. You tin can also check just how much battery ability those apps are using.

Other cases of apps running in the groundwork are more obvious. For case, if you're streaming music from the Spotify or Rdio app and leave the app, the music will keep to stream and play. If you don't want the app running in the background, yous tin stop the music playback.

Overall, apps running in the background aren't something y'all need to worry about so much on iOS. If you want to save battery life and preclude apps from running in the background, the place to exercise information technology is in the Background App Refresh screen.

Believe it or non, removing apps from memory using the multitasking interface could really atomic number 82 to less bombardment life in the long run. When y'all re-open such an app, your telephone will accept to read its data into RAM from your device's storage and re-launch the app. This takes longer and uses more ability than if you had just let the app suspend peacefully in the groundwork.

Paradigm Credit: Karlis Dambrans on Flickr