Apple execs reply to customer emails from time to time on various issues. At least in public, this is the first time we have seen Craig Federighi intervene and reply to an email sent to Tim Cook. Like other Apple exec emails sent to readers, Craig’s message is short but succinct. He answers the question as well as thanking Caleb for being an Apple customer.
Why does quitting all your apps have no impact on iPhone battery life?
Quitting all your apps is clearly not supposed to be a thing, as it involves laboriously swiping up on tens to hundreds of individual app windows in the multitasking view. On a technical level, most of the apps are either frozen in RAM or not running at all, the system just displays them as a history for consistency. This is why the battery life impact is negligible.
Apps that do affect battery life are only things that actually do perform background operations, things like GPS navigation, background music playback and similar. However, you only really have these running when you are using them. As such, using force quit (swipe up gesture) should generally only be necessary when an app needs a hard reset as it has glitched or got stuck somehow.
Thanks Caleb.
