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max2

macrumors 603
Original poster
May 31, 2015
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What does it exactly do and is it a good feature to have?

I know it takes a lot of battery.
 
It updates your most used apps in the background so that the information is readily available to you when you launch the app. Also, it doesn’t use a lot of battery. I have it turned on for almost all of my apps. However, Facebook is a huge battery hog, so if you use that then that’s probably the main culprit.
 
Personally I keep all my iPhones on low power mode now, which disabled background app refresh among other things. Benchmark shows that it does slow down the CPU speed, but since iPhones are so fast it doesn't make a difference to me, and seems to get extra battery as a result.
 
I keep it turned off. If I'm missing out on anything I'm not aware. I don't see why I need to have apps using power and cpu resources refreshing in the background when not in use. It's not like it takes them long to start up or retrieve data when I'm ready to use them.
 
iOS will kill background apps after either a certain amount of time passes or enough ram hog apps are in use while its in the background. Background App Refresh helps minimize this - if you've got enough ram
 
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I keep it turned off. If I'm missing out on anything I'm not aware. I don't see why I need to have apps using power and cpu resources refreshing in the background when not in use. It's not like it takes them long to start up or retrieve data when I'm ready to use them.

Personally I feel that we’ve gone past the days to have to worry about CPU cycle and power usage. The OS is smart enough to handle all that better than a human intervention. At least in my usage it works absolutely fine without issue and also helps me not to worry about things like that.
 
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Does exactly what is says - it refreshes apps in the background. So when you exit Twitter for example and go back 5 mins later, it will have refresh the content for you so you don't have to manually do it.
 
Does exactly what it says. Refresh apps in the background.
 
To add on to others, it was revealed recently that developers have been exploiting Background App Refresh to track users and sell their data. All around, I don’t notice a difference in functionality without it and I save battery and my privacy.
 
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