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iOS 4 – Close an app (and prevent battery drain)

July 13, 2010 By 23 Comments
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I really like iOS4 – It gives me a lot features I use every single day (Every hour to be quite honest).
But there’s one major downside to iOS 4: It’s batterylife.

The iPhone’s battery life never really was very good – Therefore I bought a Morphie Juice Pack Air last year, but with iOS4 on the iPhone 3GS the battery drain is significantly more than iPhone OS 3.1.2. Eventhough Johan already posted a nice post with a few tips how to keep your battery drain at a low level, I thought it would be good to share this tip as well.

I think the battery drain mainly is because of the new multitasking feature in iOS 4. Multitasking lets you quickly switch from one app to another, and return to the first app and go on where you left with the first application. But with heavy applications like Navigon or TomTom (which use a lot of battery anyway) it’s sometimes not good to have them running in the background all the time. With these applications, when I reach my destination I’d like to completely close the application and start it whenever I need it again.

Walk-through

Now there’s a solution to that – and the solution is directly in iOS4, but a lot of people don’t know about it.
When double-clicking the home-tab you’ll get a list of all ‘open’ applications. This list can become very long.

Now tab-and-hold with your finger on an application in the multitasking list.

You’ll get to see a close button on every single application. Pushing the close-button closes the application and removes it from the multitasking list. This can be done with every application in the list. In the example above I closed NAVIGON, becasue It took to many resources and I didn’t need to get directions anymore. So after pushing the close-button on the Navigon tab – all the other applications move to the left and the blank spot is filled with an other open application (In this case WunderRadio)

Update from comment Johan: When scrolling your finger to the left, You’ll get to see the next 4 ‘open’ applications. In this way you can more specifically select which application you want to close.

By repeating this on all the other open applications it is possible to completely get the list Empty so that no application is open anymore (And therefore doesn’t take any system resources)

Return to the default home-screen just like you’re used to do by pushing the Home-button once.

Concluding Thoughts

In my opinion this is the best way to get more out of the battery-life during the day on the iPhone (3GS). By closing an application in stead of just hitting the Home-button I honestly can say that the battery drain of my iPhone 3GS is significantly less than just leave the app ‘open’ in the background.
If you think your iPhone’s battery drains more after the iOS 4 update, I’d recommend this procedure and hope your battery drain problem is solved as well.

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  • http://Www.MobilityMinded.com Johan van Mierlo

    Great Paul,

    Actually you can be selective which ones you can close. After the double tap you can slide the bar to the left to see all the Programs that are running. Even after the tap and hold you can slide and select which ones to close. If you slide to the right you actually get your iPod controls.

    Johan

    • http://www.mobilityminded.com Paul Willen

      Thanks for your comment Johan, I added it to the post, because not everyone always reads the comments ;)

      Paul

  • suntoro

    This does not work with my daughter’s iPod Touch 2g after installing iOS4. Double-clicking the home button just brings you home. Does this only work with the iPhone 4?

    • http://www.mobilityminded.com Paul Willen

      The iPod Touch 2nd generation doesn’t support multitasking (just like the iPhone 3G). And therefore it isn’t possible to close applications.
      It will work for the iPod Touch 3rd Generation, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4.

      // Paul

  • Frances

    Thanks so much for this – for a start, since upgrading to OS4 I hadn’t been able to find out how to get to the multi-tasking bit, so that was a nice extra. I’m still waiting to see if it helps against battery drain to close the apps, but it makes sense to me.

  • Anon

    The annoying thing about closing down extra applications is the number of extra swipes and clicks you have to accumulate each day just to make the battery life more inefficient. IMO- not very efficient and all!

  • Ben

    Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t believe that all of those apps are actually running and taking resources. Instead, certain API’s are running. For example, if I have Pandora playing music and start surfing the web, only the background audio API is open and streaming music, as opposed to the whole app which displays album art etc. At most times, I have 10-15 apps at the bottom of the screen and if there were 10-15 apps actually running the phone would barely function. I believe that with IOS4, apps were made to quickly save the state that they were in (eg. responding to an sms in the middle of a game of guitar hero and then resuming the game where you left off). In fact, before upgrading the 4, my 3GS battery life increased even with all of the apps “open”. Like Mr. Jobs said, if you have to worry about closing apps and managing memory, the device will fail.

  • Art

    Ben is right, your article is based on a misunderstanding. This misunderstanding is already widespread and growing all the time as people copy each others blogs without checking the facts.

    The list you see when you double-tap Home is a “recently used apps” list; it is NOT a running apps list.

    As the whole point of your blog waw based on this mistake I think you really need to remove it, before yet more bloggers copy it and mislead even more people.

    • http://www.mobilityminded.com Paul Willen

      Hi Art and Ben,

      Thanks for your comment.
      I must admit that the list you see when you double-tab the Home button is NOT a running apps list, but closing all these apps DOES prevent battery drain.

      Nevertheless I did some research about the battery drain.
      I charged the iPhone to 100% and disconnected the iPhone from power at 14:30. I started NAVIGON and “closed” the app by pushing the Home-button.
      At 15:15 (45 minutes later) the battery percentage was 97%. (Note: I didn’t touch the iPhone in these 45 minutes)

      I charged it back to 100% again and disconnected the iPhone from power at 15:30. I started NAVIGON again and “closed” the app by truely closing it described in this post.
      At 16:22 (52 minutes later) the iPhone’s battery was 99%. (Note: I didn’t touch the iPhone in these 52 minutes)

      So to conclude. The 7 multitasking background-api’s, take system resources and drain the battery faster than normal. Some of the applications shown in the list, make use of (one of) these API’s. The others are in hibernation mode and don’t take any system resources.

      // Paul Willen

      • Ben

        Interesting. My hunch is that Navigon is using one of those background APIs: navigation. I recommend trying an app such that does not use those APIs such a calendar, notes or calculator and let us know what you find. If I had the time I’d do it myself. :)

      • Thomas

        Sorry Paul, but Art is right, you’ve misunderstood multitasking on the iPhone. It can basically do 3 things in the background. GPS, VoIP and audio streaming. If it’s not doing one of those 3 things, it NOT taking up any resources. Go read any serious description of how it’s implemented.
        NAVIGON is obviously using resources when navigating in the background. If you remembered stop the trip properly in the app, there is no issue with simply pressing the home button.

      • Ashok

        Thanks for the tips as I installed TOMTOM yesterday and my battery has been draining very fast, I have now closed the app via the instructions above – I hope this resolves the issue.

  • Ben

    Oh, and strangely enough the battery life on my Pre Plus increased when I left apps open all the time because resuming an app appears to take much less power than starting an app that is closed. All food for thought.

    • http://www.mobilityminded.com Paul Willen

      Interesting thoughts on that one for sure.
      I unfortunately don’t have the possibility to test this with a Pre Plus, but I’d be more than interested to hear some testresult from anyone who has the ability to run these tests.

      I didn’t test it completely, but I think for sure Calendar, Notes or Calculator won’t drain the battery as fast as a ‘heavy’ application like navigon.
      Thanks for sharing your thoughts Ben!

      • Ben

        I didn’t suggest those because they weren’t as resource intensive, just trying to think of a few apps that don’t run background API’s (like navigon).

  • DSj

    This article is 100 % correct. Apple should roll out a “close all” app on the ios4 main screen that terminates all background applications in one shot I stead of us doing the wiggly thing every single time then closing the app one by one whenever I wNt to put my phone in the pocket to prevent battery drain.

  • Ben

    I didn’t suggest those because they weren’t as resource intensive, just trying to think of a few apps that don’t run background API’s (like navigon).

  • Tresy

    I came on this workaround myself and wondered if I was the only one or if I misunderstood what removing an app did. Re Navigon, it seems to really drain the battery when tracking a route; merely starting the app and then Putting it in the background does not affect it nearly so much.

    Lastly iTunes and possibly safari seem to load at startup; killing them this way can lead to problems. For instance my car stereo can’t run iTunes after doing this, and only rebooting the iPhone fixes the problem.

  • Jbguy

    @Thomas and @any one that said apps not closed do not use any resource, you are stupid. Jailbreak your iPhone and install sbsettings then you will see available memory goes down and you open and hit home button. This is just a stupid way that Apple come with multitasking! Only few apps that is good use if they are running in the background, the rest need to be closed when you hit the home button.

  • Prophecy

    Thank you so much! My iphone 3gs IOS4 was using os much battery life, and was getting extremely hot, and I didn’t know why.

    I wasnt aware that simply closing an app with the home-tab key means it was still running; i had over 20 apps running in the background!

    Not even 15 minutes and my battery life would decline from 100% to 95%, without even using it!!

    Thanks so much for the help

    • http://www.mobilityminded.com Paul Willen

      You’re very much welcome Prophecy. Glad I could help ;)

      // Paul

  • Bill Romer

    While the info on multitasking may or may not be correct (I’m no expert myself), I can verify that closing apps in this list does improve battery life.

    Skype was a HUGE drain, but only after I used it the first time, logged in, and then hit the home button to exit. I’ve since removed it.

    I suspect – and have some proof of the fact – that a few other apps are causing the same problem, but I don’t know how to tell which ones.

    Perhaps it’s the ones that allow push. My latest suspects are things like Last.fm, Paypal, and maybe one or two others. Updated apps seem to be adding push capability regularly.

    My next experiment is to disable push in settings and see if that helps at all.

    Thanks for confirming some of my own research.