Do you 'close' your iOS apps?

[Ben]

Well, do you?

I know of a few people who regularly, systematically open the app tray and close all open apps one by one. I never do this unless I need to quit an app for some specific reason and view it as a complete waste of time... I also feel no ill effects. I'm curious to hear other experiences.

[miffed]

Only time I close anything is when I have a problem with an App freezing , and then I think "hmm, perhaps I should close these 1,423 others ?" I think I'd like to see a "close all" option as when I do this it seems to take ages.

[Hands0n]

Ditto Miffed. I never close an app, I never reboot the iPhone (or Android for that matter) unless there is a problem to hand. That happens from time to time, some apps are worse than others. But generally I leave it to the 21st century operating system to take care of such matters for me. This isn't Symbian, after all

[Ben]

Where on Earth are all these religious app closes, hmm? I know you're out there!

[Wilt]

I thought there was no point closing apps on iOS due to the way it handles multitasking?

[Hands0n]

I thought there was no point closing apps on iOS due to the way it handles multitasking?

Yup, and the same applies to Android. Both OS are quite capable of handling the multitasking and backgrounding of apps. But where developers introduce various bugs, most notably around in-app memory management, problems begin to occur. The apps themselves become unstable or unresponsive. They may crash entirely. Rarely will they crash the host OS though - although it has been seen before also.

So, the actual need to close an app is entirely redundant on iOS. Generally

[gorilla]

I close apps sometimes, but generally I never bother. I find iOS does a good job of managing 'open' apps.

Anyway, you may want to read "Misconceptions About iOS Multitasking" which does a good job of summing it up.

I do get the impression that people (me included) look at open apps like they've left the tap running!

[miffed]

My feeling is that for the large part , multitasking was only ever a stick to beat Apple with clutched at by the Apple hate brigade anyway.

[Sajjad Rahman]

I never close the apps, but then again I do restart them every night to face any problems with performance.

[The Mullet of G]

I close apps regularly, but having my device jailbroken I can observe its memory use and other factors and actually do see a real world gain. Fraser Speirs while providing a reasonable explanation is possibly guilty of oversimplifying things and thus missing the finer points of memory management. Currently with only 15 apps suspended in my multitasking tray I'm down to 17MB of RAM it typically sits around 20-40MB, if I try to open up another memory intensive app or game then I have to effectively wait till the OS can claw back RAM from the suspended programs, it doesn't matter how good your OS is this is never faster than using truly free RAM. As someone who notices tiny differences in silly things like the time between beats in a song, I can tell when the OS is clawing back memory and it irritates me. Also if I manage the memory then my web browser doesn't have to refresh pages when I open it, as I have plenty of RAM.

For the average user this probably isn't an issue, but I'm not the average user.

[Ben]

Also if I manage the memory then my web browser doesn't have to refresh pages when I open it, as I have plenty of RAM.

This HAS to be fixed. There's no way RAM should still be impacting whether web pages refresh or not. Sure, kick them out of RAM and write them to the flash storage, but the refreshing... ahh!

[The Mullet of G]

This HAS to be fixed. There's no way RAM should still be impacting whether web pages refresh or not. Sure, kick them out of RAM and write them to the flash storage, but the refreshing... ahh!

I totally agree, I can't understand why they don't flush things like that to a page file of sorts on the flash storage, it's not like it''s using a mechanical hard drive so the performance hit would be minimal and a lot more desirable than the forced refresh.

[Craig]

I 'close' the apps after using apart from the main ones I use all the time.

I know it has no benefit but I do it simply because it means it is less cluttered when multitasking.

[sven31]

i'll close every time i remember... and most of time i remember...