Apple has revealed swiping apps closed on iPhones could lead to less battery life and cause the device's battery to degrade more quickly.
Now, that might seem counter-intuitive at first glance, but apparently it's true.
According to the technology giant, getting shut of all the apps that are open, which seems like a good idea, could end up making them take longer to load and slowly causing the phone to slow down.
The official line from Apple is you shouldn't bother closing an app down unless the app has frozen.
Apple said: "When your recently used apps appear, the apps aren't open, but they're in standby mode to help you navigate and multitask.
"You should force an app to close only if it's unresponsive."
The false belief that less apps means longer battery life comes from the misconception that apps which appear on the 'carousel' are actually running.
They're not. They're just frozen so that they don't take up any extra resources from the device while you do whatever else it is you're doing.
John Gruber, a gadget-focused journalist, wrote on his blog Daring Fireball: "Apps in the background are effectively 'frozen', severely limiting what they can do in the background and freeing up the RAM they were using. iOS is really, really good at this.
"It is so good at this that unfreezing a frozen app takes up way less CPU (and energy) than relaunching an app that had been force quit.
"Not only does force quitting your apps not help, it actually hurts. Your battery life will be worse and it will take much longer to switch apps if you force quit apps in the background."
What does sap away your battery life is constantly reopening apps from scratch, as you have to do once you've swiped off them.
More strain on the battery eventually wears it down, meaning they don't last as long.
Gruber continued: "If you're worried that background apps are draining your battery and you see how quickly they load from the background, it's a reasonable assumption to believe that they never stopped running.
"But they did. They really do get frozen, the RAM they were using really does get reclaimed by the system, and they really do unfreeze and come back to life that quickly."
There you have it. Only close apps if they're not working properly.
If you are worried about them running in the background, check out the permissions they've got regarding background running in the iPhone Settings.
It's as simple as that.
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