You have probably done it hundreds of times without thinking about it.
Your battery starts getting low, so you double tap or swipe up and start clearing everything out. Instagram gone. Maps gone. Messages gone. You swipe them all away one by one like you are cleaning up a messy desk and somehow it feels productive, like you just gave your phone a little breathing room.
It is one of the most common phone habits in America. And it is almost entirely pointless.
Not only does closing background apps not meaningfully save your battery, but in many cases it actually uses a little more battery by forcing your phone to reload those apps from scratch the next time you open them.
Here is why.
When you press the home button or swipe away from an app, it does not keep running the way a program does on a computer. Most apps enter a suspended or inactive state where they consume minimal CPU resources and virtually no battery power. The app remains in memory so it can resume quickly the next time you open it.
Your phone is doing this automatically and intelligently. It knows which apps you use most often. It keeps them ready in memory so they open fast. When it needs more space, it quietly removes the ones you have not used in a while on its own. You do not need to manage this manually because your phone is already doing it better than you can.
When you swipe everything away, you are essentially interrupting that system. Closing all the apps makes your phone take longer and use more power to open them later from a cold state. You just made your phone slower and lowered your battery life for no reason.
Apple’s own engineering team has confirmed this. Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering directly addressed this topic when a user emailed Tim Cook asking whether closing apps was necessary for battery life. The answer was no.
Now, there are a few situations where closing a specific app actually does make sense.
If an app is frozen and not responding, closing it and reopening it fixes the problem. If you check your battery settings and one particular app is listed as consuming an unusually high amount of power, closing that specific app stops the drain. GPS apps, video call apps, and apps that constantly check your location are actually running in the background even when you have minimized them, and closing those does stop the drain on your battery.
But closing your entire app switcher every hour because you think it is helping? It is not. It is just extra work.
If you genuinely want to improve your phone’s battery life, the things that actually make a real difference are much simpler. Your screen brightness is almost certainly the single biggest drain on your battery, and turning it down even slightly makes a noticeable difference. Location services running in the background for apps that do not need them are a quiet but constant drain. Push notifications that wake your screen up dozens of times a day add up more than most people realize.
These are the settings worth adjusting. The app switcher is not.
The habit of closing all your apps is one of those things that became phone common sense somewhere around 2012 when older operating systems genuinely did handle background processes less efficiently. Repeatedly closing and reopening apps can use more battery as the phone must reload them from scratch. The only time you should manually close apps is when they are frozen or you will not be using them for an extended period.
Smartphones have changed a lot since then. This particular piece of advice has not kept up.
So next time your battery is getting low, skip the app-closing ritual. Turn the brightness down a notch, turn off location for the apps that do not need it, and let your phone manage its own memory the way it was designed to.
Your battery will not notice the difference. But your time will.
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