Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Other Do you force close your apps everytime? Is there OCD?

With the exception of the rare case where a bug allows an app to consume CPU/etc while suspended, force-closing an app can lead to a less-than-ideal performance profile as you're requiring all those apps to be reloaded from storage every time.

Good rule of thumb is: if you're not having issues with the app, no need to force close it.
 
  • Like
Reactions: ericwn
FlippyGonnaSnap said:
Despite all rational and scientific logic I close everything. It’s like an itch you can’t scratch.

I think having to work with Vista and 512mb ram for a year has left me scarred for life even though it was well over a decade ago.
Click to expand...

Vista scarred all of us, I don’t blame you

In fact I owned both a Vista machine and a Symbian smartphone with 64MB RAM (Nokia N80) and you’d have like 15mb RAM at boot up and about 4-5 apps in you’d get stuff constantly closing, lol, you could just see the RAM dropping in the task manager, using these older OSs I’m sure has left many of us with some bad habits

Luckily I got over closing stuff a few years ago.
 
I close my apps and leave the games. I'm also a developer. So I understand what I'm doing is not only useless, but can eat more battery and lead to longer load times. There's no logic behind my behavior and no point in trying to make sense of it. It's just how I do things. And while I don't suffer from actual OCD, I've certainly been called that enough to appreciate what I'm doing is dumb. I've never noticed significant side-effects on my end, so I'll probably continue doing it.
 
I am not sure how the algorithm in iOS works with constantly killing apps vs. doing the same in Android but my experience with Android taught me that if you get in the habit of constantly killing apps (or using a task killer) you end up with an extremely poor experience, hot phone or horrid battery life.

Android for example 'learns' which apps you use most by how often you open them and how long you leave them running. Constantly using a task killer or killing apps each time teaches it that you want them to close more than they should, which usually meant losing notifications or if using a task killer, it was constantly killing the app's background services and causing CPU usage to skyrocket resulting in hot phone/short battery life.

I have just err'd on the side of caution and let the iPhone do its thing. Eventually I reboot and close everything out after and start fresh.
 
I don't believe there is any need to do it. I will do so occasionally, just to neaten things up. My wife does it anytime she is done with an app. I don't see there is any harm in either choice. I don't think it was any thing do to with the clinical condition of OCD.
 
  • Like
Reactions: tranceking26
Of all the things one can worry about... I choose to not worry about how many iPhone apps are open in the background, and my iPhone's performance doesn't seem any worse for my laziness.
 
The only apps I will force close after using are the ones I don’t use regularly.

Messages, Whatsapp, Twitter, Insta, Safari, Spotify, Settings, Facebook are always open.

I’ll force close everything else and probably force close everything once a week or so.

Having those always open doesn’t affect battery or performance
 
The only Apps I force close when I’m finished using them are google maps and Apple maps. As I don’t want them using data and doing things in the background when I don’t need them to. The rest stay open forever.
 
  • Like
Reactions: hewastl286
No apps are being manually closed by me except when troubleshooting.

I don’t find my phone performance lacking in any way.
 
cynics said:
Force closing an app in iOS is like Force Quit in MacOS or End Task from Task Manager in Windows 10. A healthy app cycle includes the opportunity to tidy up, save data, release its resources and end the app process. Apple says it should only be used for unresponsive apps (like MacOS and Windows force quit).
Click to expand...

As a developer: When you swipe out an app, iOS first puts it in the background. That's because many apps will do useful things when they go in the background, to be prepared when they come out of the background, and they will have some time to finish things they need to do. For example, if you swipe out an app just as it is saving changes to an important document, the app will finish those changes.

And after putting the app in the background, iOS tells the app that it will be killed, so the app has a chance to do anything needed for that situation. So all in all, swiping out an app is a completely harmless operation that won't do any harm.
 
I used to keep things relatively pruned, but I've gotten more and more lazy about this as there's no appreciable benefit and I'm not a huge app user anyway so there generally aren't all that many to flick through.
 
  • Like
Reactions: ericwn
gnasher729 said:
As a developer: When you swipe out an app, iOS first puts it in the background. That's because many apps will do useful things when they go in the background, to be prepared when they come out of the background, and they will have some time to finish things they need to do. For example, if you swipe out an app just as it is saving changes to an important document, the app will finish those changes.

And after putting the app in the background, iOS tells the app that it will be killed, so the app has a chance to do anything needed for that situation. So all in all, swiping out an app is a completely harmless operation that won't do any harm.
Click to expand...

"Harm" is a strong word that I avoided using however "completely harmless" isn't exactly accurate either. Battery life can be directly effected especially if you are OCD as the OP claims (close the app, open it 5 minutes later, close the app, open it again,...). You're app loses background fetch as well.
 
The only app I tend to close, is my Outlook app, for work.
When off/after work, I don't even want to see the app open by accident, to then see an email I should ignore till the next business day (I work in IT...!).

I know, weird. But, just me...
 
I do it of and on depending on differing conditions. In a lot of cases I find that it's quicker to open an app clean, knowing exactly where it is is on my home screen, than trying to find it in a list of open apps swiping left and right on the switcher. Additionally, while an app may be "open", if RAM is squeezed it'll reload anyway saving very little time had it not been open at all.

There's a balance to it. If Apple put more RAM into the iPhone then that balance would shift. Better optimised to Android or not, reloading is reloading and I find my iPhone Xs needs to reload significantly more than my Galaxy S10 as it has half the RAM.

As a side observation, I do it far more on Android to iOS. Not because I need to, in fact I feel the double RAM makes for a smoother experience in this regard, but rather that "Close all" button makes it really easy to do (as opposed to having to swipe every single iOS app). So rather than caring about what's open, what's not, where in the list it is etc etc I'll not care and just close everything as it's the quickest and simplest thing to do.
 
I close out of all the apps before I put my phone on the charger at night. Its more of a mental thing, to "close" out the day as I retire for the night.
 
I never force close my apps that I'm on. I let iOS manage that for me. The only app that I force close is Facebook but rest I don't do anything with it.
 
The only app I close, is Google maps, because it runs in background.

It always felt cringy for me when I see how persistently people close apps they've used. Like they unlock their phone, use one single app, then close it and lock the phone.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back