iPhone How to Close Apps: Why You Probably Don't Need to Do It

You’re probably doing it right now. You double-tap that home button or swipe up from the bottom of your screen, see a messy stack of digital cards, and start flicking them away like you’re clearing clutter off a desk. It feels productive. It feels like you're giving your phone a literal breath of fresh air. But honestly, when it comes to the iPhone how to close apps debate, most of us have been trained to do exactly the wrong thing for over a decade.

Apple’s software architecture isn't like Windows 95. Your iPhone doesn't "struggle" under the weight of open apps the way an old PC might. In fact, the way iOS handles memory is almost aggressive in its efficiency. When you leave an app, it doesn't stay "open" in the traditional sense; it enters a suspended state where it consumes virtually zero CPU power.

How to actually close apps on your iPhone

If an app is frozen, glitchy, or just acting weird, you definitely need to kill it. This is the only time you should really be doing this.

For anyone using an iPhone with Face ID—that’s the iPhone X, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, or 16—the process is a quick gesture. Swipe up from the bottom edge of the screen and pause in the middle. Don't just flick it; hold it for a split second until the App Switcher appears. Now, find the culprit. Swipe up on the app's preview card, and it’s gone. It’s dead.

If you're rocking an older device like an iPhone SE or an iPhone 8, you still have that physical (or haptic) home button. Double-click the Home button quickly. The same card-stack view appears. Flick the app card toward the top of the screen to shut it down.

The Great Battery Myth

Here is the kicker: closing your apps constantly might actually be draining your battery faster.

Think about it like a car. It takes significantly more energy to start an engine from a cold stop than it does to keep it idling or restart it while it’s warm. When you force close an app, you purge it from the iPhone’s RAM (Random Access Memory). The next time you open Instagram or Mail, the processor has to reload every single asset, bit of code, and data packet from scratch. This causes a spike in power consumption.

Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, famously confirmed this in an email to a user. When asked if he quits his iOS multitasking apps frequently and if it's necessary for battery life, his answer was a simple, definitive "No and No."

Apple’s official support documentation echoes this. They explicitly state that you should only force an app to close if it’s unresponsive. Otherwise, the system handles the heavy lifting. iOS is designed to "freeze" apps in the background. If the system needs more RAM for a high-intensity task, like playing a 1440p video or rendering a game, it will automatically kill the oldest suspended apps to make room. It doesn't need your help.

Background App Refresh vs. Closing Apps

There is a middle ground here. People often get confused between an app being "open" and an app "working."

Go into your Settings, tap General, and look at Background App Refresh. This is where the real battery drain happens. This setting allows apps to check for new content even when you aren't using them. If your podcast app is downloading new episodes or your weather app is constantly grabbing GPS data, that's what's eating your juice—not the fact that the app is sitting in your App Switcher.

• Turn off Background App Refresh for apps that don't need it.
• Keep it on for things like Maps or Messaging.
• Basically, if you don't need instant notifications from an app, kill its background privileges.

When you absolutely MUST close an app

Sometimes, code just breaks. It happens to the best developers. You might notice your iPhone getting hot in your pocket, or maybe Spotify is refusing to play the next track even though you have five bars of 5G.

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In these specific scenarios, the iPhone how to close apps workflow is your best friend.

1. The Frozen App: The screen won't respond to touches within the app, but you can still swipe home. Kill it.
2. Audio Ghosts: You've stopped a video, but the audio keeps playing in the background. Kill the app.
3. Sync Errors: Your email won't pull new messages even after a manual refresh. Force quitting forces a reconnection to the server.
4. Privacy: If you’ve just looked at something sensitive—maybe banking info or a private message—and you’re handing your phone to someone else, swiping that app away ensures it won't be visible in the switcher.

What about clearing RAM?

There is an old "pro" trick that people used to swear by. It’s sorta hidden now. It involves the power button and the home button to clear the RAM without restarting. On modern iPhones, you have to enable AssistiveTouch to even try it.

Honestly? Don't bother.

Modern iPhones (especially the Pro models with 8GB of RAM or more) are more than capable of managing their own memory. Manually clearing RAM can actually lead to "hitchiness" in the UI. The system expects certain data to be ready in the memory cache. When you dump it all, the phone has to scramble to rebuild that cache, leading to those tiny stutters you might see when scrolling through your home screen.

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Habits are hard to break

I get it. It’s satisfying. There’s a certain Zen-like quality to having a clean App Switcher. You see twenty apps back there and you feel like your phone is "messy."

But try an experiment for one week. Stop swiping them away. Just leave them there. You’ll likely find that your phone feels faster because apps resume instantly. You might even notice your battery lasts an extra twenty or thirty minutes at the end of the day because the CPU isn't constantly re-initializing heavy apps like Facebook or YouTube.

The technical reality of iOS states

To really understand why you should leave them alone, you have to look at the five states an iOS app can be in.

• Not Running: The app hasn't been launched or was explicitly killed.
• Active: You are looking at it. It's using resources.
• Inactive: The app is in the foreground but not receiving events (like when you get a phone call overlay).
• Background: The app is out of sight but still doing something (like playing music).
• Suspended: The app is in memory but doing nothing. This is where most of your "open" apps live.

When an app is Suspended, it's essentially a screenshot stored in your RAM. It's not "running" any more than a photo in your gallery is "running."

Actionable Next Steps for a Faster iPhone

Instead of obsessing over closing apps, follow these steps to actually improve your device performance and battery longevity:

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1. Check Battery Usage: Go to Settings > Battery. Look at the list of apps. If an app shows a high percentage of "Background Activity" and you rarely use it, that's the one you should manage—not by closing it, but by adjusting its settings.
2. Update Your Apps: Developers constantly release patches for "memory leaks." A memory leak is when an app forgets to release RAM it's no longer using. Keeping apps updated via the App Store prevents the need to force close them.
3. Restart Weekly: Instead of flicking apps away, just turn your iPhone off and back on once a week. This clears out temporary system files and resets the kernel in a way that force-closing an app never will.
4. Manage Location Services: Many apps "wake up" because you move, not because they are "open." Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services and set unnecessary apps to "While Using."

Stop worrying about the App Switcher. Your iPhone is smarter than you think, and it’s perfectly happy with fifty apps sitting in its memory. Let the software do the work it was designed to do.