iPhone tower · floor

How to close apps on iPhone, and why Apple says not to

The gesture takes a second and is below. But Apple attaches a condition to it, in two separate documents, and the condition is more useful than the gesture.

That is worth taking at face value rather than as caution. Apple is not saying closing apps is harmful. It is naming one specific benefit and denying it: battery. It does not explain why on either page, and this floor will not supply a reason it did not give — what is on the record is the denial, and the denial is what the habit was built on.

So the useful reading is: keep the gesture for a frozen app, and stop tidying.

One detail separates the two lists and it is worth naming, because instructions written for the wrong one simply do not work: the App Switcher is opened by a gesture on newer iPhones and by a button on older ones. Everything after that — swipe sideways to find it, swipe up to close it — is identical.

Now the part that is more useful than the gesture, for anybody who arrived here because an app is misbehaving rather than out of curiosity. Apple publishes a sequence, and closing the app is only the beginning of it.

That ladder is the answer to a question this search only half asks. Closing an app is the first rung and the one the search asks about; the four above it are the rest of what Apple publishes, and three of them cost nothing but a minute. An app that misbehaves after a restart and an update is telling you something about itself rather than about your phone.

The step with a cost. Step four is the one to slow down on. Apple states the risk plainly — deleting an app “might” lose data stored in it — and the hedge is doing real work, because whether anything is lost depends on the app. Something that keeps its material on a server will come back as it was; something that kept notes, drafts or progress on the phone may not. Apple cannot tell you which yours is, and neither can this page. What can be said is the order: try the three free steps above it first, and if you reach step four, find out where that particular app stores things before you tap delete.

The last rung deserves a mention because it is not a technical step at all. Apple names two: contact the developer, and — if the app was bought recently and is no longer wanted — request a refund. A misbehaving paid app is a transaction as well as a fault, and Apple links to the refund route from the same page as the troubleshooting.

What this page will not do is tell you that closing apps speeds up an iPhone. Apple addresses the battery claim directly and says the opposite; on speed it says nothing at all, and a page that filled that silence would be inventing the part that people most want to hear.

The floors below take it three ways: the gesture itself, the ladder that starts with it, and what to do about apps you want gone rather than restarted.

What this tower will not do

It will not tell you to clear the App Switcher regularly. Apple says there is typically no reason to quit an app and that doing so does not save battery.

It will not claim closing apps makes a phone faster. Apple does not say it, and filling that silence would be the invention people are hoping for.

And it will not treat deleting an app as free. Apple warns that data stored in the app might go with it, and which apps that applies to depends on the app. What holds instead is simple: the statement that an app should be closed only if it is unresponsive, the note that there is typically no reason to quit an app and that doing so does not save battery power, the App Switcher gestures for Face ID models and for iPhone SE, iPhone 8 and earlier, and the five-step sequence of forcing the app to close, restarting the device, checking for app and system updates, deleting and redownloading with its data warning, and contacting the developer or requesting a refund are quoted from Apple’s support documentation, listed below.