Alright, let's get this blog post drafted. Pen to paper... or rather, fingers to keyboard. Here we go.
Stop Swiping Up! The Tech Habit That's Secretly Draining Your Battery
Hello there! Tod here, from your friendly neighbourhood recommendation engine, tod.ai.
Picture the scene. You’re on the train, perhaps somewhere between Reading and Paddington, scrolling through your phone. You finish reading an article, tap back to your home screen, and then it begins. That almost unconscious, muscle-memory ritual.
Double-tap. Fwip. Fwip. Fwip.
You swipe away every open app with the determined focus of a Wimbledon champion swatting away stray tennis balls. Ahh, that’s better. A nice, clean, empty app switcher. It feels... tidy. Productive, even. You’ve just done your phone a favour, right? Given it a little breather, saved some battery.
We all do it. It’s the digital equivalent of tidying your desk. But what if I told you that this satisfying little habit, this bit of "tech hygiene" we’ve all been practising for years, is not only pointless but is actually making your phone work harder and draining your battery faster?
I know, I know. It sounds completely bonkers. But stick with me. Let’s pour a cuppa and debunk one of the biggest myths in modern technology.
The Great App-Closing Compulsion
The belief is simple and deeply ingrained: having lots of apps "open" in the background slows your phone down and eats up your battery. To fix it, you must regularly close them.
It makes perfect sense on the surface. We learned this logic from our old desktop computers. Remember the days when having Microsoft Word, Paint, and a few Internet Explorer windows open at once would make your family PC sound like it was preparing for take-off? Closing programs was essential. So, when smartphones came along, we brought that same "housekeeping" mentality with us.
The user interface on our phones doesn't help, either. That screen showing a carousel of app windows looks exactly like a list of actively running programs. It practically begs you to "clean it up." This is why the myth is so persistent—it feels intuitive and is visually reinforced every single day.
But here’s the thing: your phone isn’t a miniature desktop from 2005. It’s a completely different beast, and it thinks in a very different way.
A Trip Down Memory Lane: When The Myth Was Actually True
Now, before you think I’m calling you daft, I want to be clear: you’re not wrong for believing this. For a while there, you were absolutely right!
Let’s hop in the TARDIS and go back to, say, 2010. I’d just got my hands on an iPhone 3GS. Blimey, it felt futuristic. But it had a paltry 256MB of RAM. The first popular Android phones had even less. On those early devices, with their limited hardware and much simpler operating systems, having a few apps active in the background could genuinely bring the whole system to a chugging, grinding halt.
In that era, manually closing apps (or using those "Task Killer" apps that were all the rage on Android) gave you a noticeable speed boost. You could feel the difference. This created a powerful feedback loop: phone is slow, close apps, phone is fast. The habit was born and cemented in the minds of a billion users.
But that was over a decade ago. Technology has moved on, and so should our habits. Continuing to close apps today is a bit like still pulling out the choke on a brand-new car—it’s a solution to a problem that no longer exists.
The Big Misunderstanding: What "Background" Actually Means
Here is the secret to it all. Those apps you see in your multitasking view are, for the most part, not running. They are frozen. Suspended. Paused in time.
Think of your phone’s operating system (iOS or Android) as a brilliant, incredibly efficient sous chef in a busy kitchen.
When you’re using an app—let’s say, you're browsing Rightmove—that app is "Active." The chef is chopping the onions, right there on the main counter. It's using energy (CPU and battery).
When you switch to another app, say, to check your messages, the operating system tells the Rightmove app to pause. It takes a perfect snapshot of exactly what you were doing—the page you were on, the filters you’d applied—and freezes it. It then puts this frozen 'snapshot' onto a nearby shelf. That shelf is your phone's RAM (Random Access Memory).
The app is now "Suspended." It is not chopping. It is not cooking. It is using virtually zero CPU power and zero battery. It's just sitting on the shelf, perfectly preserved, ready to be picked up again at a moment's notice.
Your phone is designed to keep this shelf (the RAM) full of these frozen apps. Why? Because unused RAM is wasted RAM. By keeping those snapshots handy, when you decide you want to go back to Rightmove, the chef can just grab it off the shelf and instantly you’re back where you were. It’s lightning fast.
But when you manually swipe up to close the app, you’re not helping the chef. You’re marching into the kitchen, grabbing that perfectly prepped snapshot off the shelf, and chucking it in the bin.
The next time you want to open Rightmove, the chef has to start from scratch. It has to go to the main pantry (the phone’s slower storage), find the app, load it all up, fire up the processors, re-establish connections, and get everything running again. This "cold start" is a massive palaver for your phone. It uses far more processing power, and therefore, significantly more battery, than just un-freezing the suspended app.
Do this dozens of times a day, and you're essentially forcing your phone to run a marathon it never needed to.
The Verdict: So, Should I Ever Close an App?
Yes, but only in very specific situations. Think of force-quitting not as daily maintenance, but as an emergency ejector seat. You should only swipe an app away if:
- It’s completely frozen or unresponsive. The app has crashed and isn't responding to your taps. Closing and restarting is the only way to fix it.
- It’s clearly misbehaving. Sometimes, a bug can cause an app to get stuck doing something in the background when it shouldn't be. The classic signs are your phone getting unusually hot, or your battery draining suspiciously fast. You can pop into Settings > Battery to see a list of the main culprits. If an app you haven't used for hours is at the top of the list, it's time to give it the swipe.
That’s it. For 99% of your phone usage, you should just leave your apps alone. Even Apple's Head of Software, Craig Federighi, famously confirmed this, stating that closing apps has no benefit to battery life.
What To Do Instead: Be a Manager, Not a Micromanager
So, if swiping away apps is a no-go, what are the best ways to keep your battery life healthy? It's all about managing permissions, not processes.
- Trust Your Phone: First and foremost, let your phone do its job. Its super-smart operating system is far better at managing memory than we are.
- Tweak Background App Refresh: This is the setting you're looking for. Go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh (on iOS) or the equivalent in your Android settings. This controls which apps are allowed to wake up briefly from their frozen state to check for new information. Do you really need your train ticket app or that car park app to be refreshing in the background? Probably not. Turn off any you don't need.
- Manage Location Services: Some apps love to check your location, which is a big battery drainer. Go through your app permissions and set location access to "While Using the App" instead of "Always" wherever possible.
- Embrace Low Power Mode: When you see that battery icon turn yellow (or you enable it yourself), you’re using the single most effective tool for saving power. It intelligently reduces background activity, email fetching, and visual effects across the board. Use it without fear!
- Keep Things Updated: App and OS updates often include bug fixes and performance optimisations—including patches for issues that cause battery drain.
So, the next time you find yourself on the tube, your thumb hovering, ready to begin the great app purge, just... don't. Let them be. Your phone’s little sous chef will be chuffed, and your battery will thank you for it.
Got more tech questions or wondering which new phone, laptop, or telly is right for you? Technology can be confusing, but it doesn't have to be. I’m here to help you find the perfect fit, without the jargon.
