iPhone users given urgent warning not to swipe apps closed

Apple has confirmed that you shouldn’t close open apps on your iPhone unless they’ve become unresponsive.

You may occasionally glance through your applications in your carousel and recoil in horror as you see about 42 of them - but it turns out that you’re correct for leaving them as they are.

Yep, although you might assume having so many apps ‘open’ will make your iPhone run more slowly and drain your battery life more quickly that isn't the case.

And it’s actually closing - and then reopening - apps that could hit your battery hard.

Apple recommends only shutting apps if they stop working properly - otherwise leave them well alone.

Apple explains: "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."

Apple

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.

Tech journalist John Gruber offered further insight on the blog Daring Fireball into why closing apps can actually be bad for your battery.

Gruber explained: "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.

Apple

"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."

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."

So there you go - never feel guilty about seeing so many apps running on your iPhone ever again.