Allyson Kazmucha, writing for The App Factor, lays out an excellent series of tips that will help extend your battery life.
To give you just a taste:
Location services let apps see where you’re located and can report that information back to the app. If you have apps set to Always, this can happen in the background without your knowledge.
I’ve never found a reason to completely disable location services, and there are even a few apps I let have full access. However, letting all apps run rampant in the background isn’t a good idea.
Ally then walks you through the settings, lays out a recommended path. Solid stuff, all the way around.
One quibble. At the end, Allyson says:
I see far too many people flicking apps out of the multitasking tray thinking it saves their battery. It actually does the complete opposite. iOS automatically saves states so apps can launch as they were without having to restart completely. Flicking them away and then restarting them actually consumes more battery.
Compare this process to putting your computer to sleep instead of shutting it down and restarting it each time. Which method do you think uses fewer resources?
I get the logic here, but there are times when a background app eats battery when it shouldn’t. The Facebook app is one example, and perhaps the most egregious, but it is not the only one. To get a sense if this is happening on your iPhone, take a look at the usage data on the Settings > Battery page. If there is an app at the top of the list that looks like it is eating far more than its fair share of battery, that app is a candidate for “flicking away”.
Sébastien Page wrote a nice piece on the logic behind not force quitting apps, worth a read if you’d like to learn more.
The number of times someone quits an application “to save battery” is far greater than the number of times it saves battery.
I’m actually getting really tired of the Apple experts telling me that closing apps in iOS is counterproductive. Aside from potentially saving battery life from bad-behaving apps, or even just apps that have the courtesy to give you the “when in use” option in Location Settings, there’s a larger issue.
Why does the app switcher screen even exist? Presumably, to be able to go back quickly to the apps that are relevant to you right now. And that purpose is completely destroyed when I have 57 apps open. There is no chance that I need all of those visible in my app switcher at any one time. It’s the equivalent of telling me that leaving all the documents I’ve worked on in the past week on my Desktop is a savvy move so I can find them easily. No.
So what other apps besides Facebook have done this? I have tons of apps and haven’t run across any so far. The only times I ever have to quit an app like this is if it crashes on launch because something cached is corrupt and that’s rare.
You’re doing a lot of extra work to avoid switching apps from the Home screen. That extra work is pretty much the definition of counter productive. But if you’re happy with what you’re doing and you’ve found a way to make it work for you, who cares what anyone else thinks? You shouldn’t.
That’s a terrible analogy, though.
“Force quitting” an app does NOT prevent it from doing any background work (the system will relaunch the app in the background).
Background Refresh gets a bad rap. It has very little effect on battery since (as a developer), I cannot just tell the system “refresh every 1 minute”. I can set a minimum threshold that I want the system to do some action, but it’s not a guarantee.
The system culls background tasks and performs them intelligently. For example, if your app refreshes data from the internet, it will wait until you’ve woken the phone up and have accessed the internet to do the background refresh. The idea is that the radios are already on (cell or WiFi), so take advantage of that (instead of making a network query whenever the developer asks for it).
It’s far faster to switch to an app you need but haven’t had open recently by pulling down on the Home screen, typing the first couple letters of the app’s name, and selecting it, than it is to kill every app you don’t intend to use soon. And if it’s an app you JUST used, it’s still right there in the app switcher, and right below the search box when you pull down on the Home screen (in iOS 9).
That said, I still kill every Facebook app as soon as I am done with them because they’ve abused backgrounding for years and my battery life has thanked me profusely for it.
Skype used to stay open in the background (it used to freak me out, because I kept hearing the Skype login noise periodically, even though I hadn’t used the app in days or weeks). I eventually uninstalled it to stop it, but I believe it now simply sends a push notification to your device instead and begins the connection process once you open the app.
I can’t verify the validity of your statement, but I can say with a fair amount of certainty that “force quitting” Facebook with Background App Refresh for it disabled does indeed prevent it from relaunching. It may be possible for some apps to be relaunched in the background with Background App Refresh enabled, but I have yet to have any app reopen in the background after force quitting it in iOS 8 or 9.
It’s not a great analogy, I’ll grant you. But the point is still true: clutter is rarely conducive to efficiency.
Yup. As much as I like the switcher, I do wish there it was a little different somehow to be less cluttery. Perhaps apps I used only very briefly could be pushed further into the past as time goes on? Because its recollection of the apps I used recently is perfect, but mine rarely is.