How-To Close Apps on an iPhone/iPad

Apple's usability bugs me on exiting running programs.

Amazing kid. This was a lot of fun to watch. He should get an iPad of his own as a reward!

@jmnugent: well said! wish you would repost that on YouTube to put an end to the negative comments the video is getting! :-)

While many will tell you that it's unnecessary to kill background Apps in iOS (and that iOS should fluidly and effectively manage performance/memory use without any user intervention).... I've not found this to be true in every day usage.

The pattern I've noticed on my iPhone4/iPad2 (both have latest iOS5.1.1) is that over longer and longer lengths of time between rebooting AND heavier and heavier multitasking ( a wide range of memory intensive apps).. that the devices/iOS stability and performance seems to be impacted to a slightly noticeable degree.

I can show this by using an App like iStat to watch a variety of indicators (Uptime, memory usage, memory-paging, etc)

If I force-close individual Apps (or better yet, do a full shutdown/reboot of the device).. it instantly regains snappy performance. I've found the best strategy (for me) is to do full reboots of my devices about every 3 to 4 days.

Well, the spears.org article is mostly right. However, I would assume the iPhone practices aggressive power management, which typically includes shutting down DRAM banks that aren't currently needed. So you can potentially save power if you flush enough apps from memory, but that's not quite the same thing as closing them from the task bar (which may include applications that were already flushed from memory).

And it certainly has little to do with them "running" in the background. That was Apple's complaint about giving apps free reign to do whatever they wanted, and why they implemented a rather restrictive model that leads to funny behavior occasionally.

The most important side effect closing apps in the task bar can have is speeding up load times for other applications you may open/reopen later, since you can avoid the flushing phase if there's already free memory available. That's the only reason I tend to manage my task bar; because I want better responsiveness on other apps after I close a memory hog.

Cute (but wrong): http://speirs.org/blog/2012/1/2/misconceptions-about-ios-multitasking.html

^^^HEY! He does it HIS way!

Very cute, but not necessarily correct.

http://ryantrotz.com/2012/05/ios-multitasking-stop-force-quitting-applications/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ios-multitasking-stop-force-quitting-applications

Smart AND cute! My, they sure do grow up fast! :)