Go around and ask any semi-tech savvy person and he/she will tell you the same thing; close the unwanted applications to save battery life. Is it true or just a myth? We asked iOS and Android experts, the answer is quite different from what you’d expect.
As it turns out, this self-created practice of closing unwanted applications is nothing but a waste of time and energy because it doesn’t do anything good for the smartphone’s battery life.
Hiroshi Lockheimer, SVP of Android, Chrome OS, and Chrome, was recently asked if closing apps on Android did any wonders for the battery life. Lockheimer told us that Android is already optimized for managing what is being run, and messing with this ongoing process increases the battery consumption. You hear that folks? Instead of relieving your battery, you end up only taxing it more.
There’s another word that’s used for this approach; thrash. Thrash is used in the context of storage and pertains to ‘overworking a storage medium by carrying out excessive movement of information between a device’s virtual memory and the physical system memory.’ So, in a nutshell, closing the apps on your phone frequently without any particular reason will slow down your gadget.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software, has the same approach to this problem as well and says that he doesn’t quit his iOS multitasking apps over and over again. Doing so doesn’t help with battery life!
To conclude, unless an app has crashed, there’s no need for you to go frantic and close down all the apps running on your device.
I’d like their opinion regarding location tracking services running while certain apps continue to run in the background and how that somehow doesn’t eat up battery life.
But what about freeing the memory the open apps use? That issue doesn’t seem to be addressed here.