The Force Quit Fallacy  →

Kyle Richter · The Syndicate ·

…Many people think that force-quitting these apps will at the very least do no harm since “they aren’t running anyways.” The logic of “…you might as well quit, just in case” comes into play. The problem is that force-quitting apps that are Suspended, and not taxing the battery, produces negative effect and can do quite the opposite of the intention.

If you force-quit an app, it’s removed from memory, its state is instead saved to disk, and the app is closed or quit. This event triggers a multitude of tasks from disk i/o, to memory swaps, and even cpu cycles processing data. If the app is relaunched, additional resources are required to open it from a closed state as opposed to the faster Suspended state. Since the OS manages purging apps when memory is already low there is no benefit to force-quitting suspended apps, unless of course they are misbehaving and need to be relaunched.

…The only time you need to force-quit an app is if it is frozen, or otherwise misbehaving – beyond that the best battery life can be attained by not force-quitting any apps.