With the addition of iOS software 4.0, came the long awaited feature of having apps open up in the background. This was Apple’s way to help you keep apps open and not have to close apps and reopen them again. The slight problem with this, is that if you leave too many of them open, you start to slowly drain your battery. The other slight problem is that, there is no natural way to “shut down” an app. Hitting the Home button doesn’t close an app, it just merely puts it in the background. We don’t realize this unless we do a little more work. Let me show you.
If you want to see what apps you have running in the background, you can press the Home button twice. A menu will pop up from the bottom of the screen. Here you will be able to scroll through all of the apps that are in the background. Depending on the app and how many, these apps could be slowly draining your iOS device’s battery.
The easiest way to close your apps is to press down on one of the apps in this menu. Here you will see the familiar “-” symbol at the top right corner of each app. Press that symbol and the app will close.
Again, this is the only true way to close an app. I tend to do this about once a week if I can remember. Hope this helps you.
June 3, 2011 at 6:23 AM
If you are experiencing performance issues with your device this is the very first thing to do to see if an improvement can be found. I’d suggest that doing such every day, and then shutting down completely with the red slide power switch just prior to recharging is an excellent procedure to follow. When the device hits the charger it will reboot with fully clear memory.
June 3, 2011 at 5:16 PM
An easier way to do this is to simply hard-restart the phone. It will take a little longer (given the long boot time), but you start with a clean memory stack each time. Plus, if you leave it off overnight, you don’t have it in standby all night (fine if you don’t use it for your alarm clock!).
June 11, 2011 at 2:30 PM
THe apps stay open even if you reboot your iPhone. It would be nice if APple provided the option to close all open apps upon shutdown and/or reboot.