If you're like a lot of iPhone users, you regularly open your phone's App Switcher and swipe to close all the apps there. You should stop doing this.

Not only does this fail to help battery life as many people claim, but it also actively works against how your iPhone is supposed to run. Let's break down why you shouldn't constantly close apps on your iPhone.

The Basics of Closing Apps on iPhone

Just so we're all on the same page, let's quickly define what swiping to close apps means. To close apps on an iPhone, you first need to open the App Switcher, which shows previews of recent apps you can tap to switch between.

Depending on your iPhone, the method to open the App Switcher differs. On an iPhone with Face ID, swipe up from the bottom of the screen and pause near the center. For iPhone models with a Home button, double-click the Home button to open the App Switcher instead.

Once there, swipe left or right to look through your apps, then swipe up on an app's preview to close that app and remove it from the list.

Why You Shouldn't Constantly Close iPhone Apps

Closing your iPhone apps all the time is counterproductive and goes against the way that iOS, the operating system that your iPhone runs, is designed.

Let's review several reasons for this.

1. Apps Don't Run in the Background

It's a common misconception that every app in the App Switcher is currently running in the background and thus using your iPhone's resources, but this isn't true. Apple's support page on switching iPhone apps states the following:

After you switch to a different app, some apps run for a short period of time before they're set to a suspended state. Apps that are in a suspended state aren’t actively in use, open, or taking up system resources.

Thus, most of the apps that appear in the App Switcher don't represent active processes. They appear in the switcher more as a matter of convenience (letting you switch back to apps you were using earlier) than as a list of all running processes.

The App Switcher is not like the Task Manager on Windows or Activity Monitor on a Mac. You don't need to close apps manually to stop them from running.

2. Your iPhone Manages RAM on Its Own

This point continues from the above. iOS does a great job of managing the resources available on your device, and by closing apps all the time, you're forcing it to work harder.

Like any computer, your iPhone has a limited amount of RAM, which it uses to store running processes. iOS regularly removes apps from RAM when they aren't needed so that there's always space available for new apps you launch.

Read more: A Quick and Dirty Guide to RAM: What You Need to Know

Apps you haven't touched for some time are automatically closed; when you open them later, they start up again. You can observe this yourself: open the switcher and scroll from left to right to reach an app that's buried deep in the list. When you tap it, the app likely won't pick up where you left off, since it was suspended a while ago to make room for apps you're using now.

For apps that you stopped using recently, iOS freezes them, then unfreezes them when you reopen, to let you resume them quickly. You might not even realize that the app was frozen when you open it again, because this happens quickly.

By closing apps all the time, you're stopping iOS from managing processes for you and losing the advantage of having frozen apps immediately available.

3. Closing Apps Forces Them to Reload

When you force close apps all the time, you're making any apps you use often less convenient.

Let's say you're texting your friend in Messages and swipe to close the app after each response. Every time a new message comes in, you have to open Messages and select the conversation with your friend again. It would be faster to just leave Messages open so you can return to that conversation as soon as you unlock your phone.

While this isn't a massive time difference, it adds up over the course of a day. But it's not just time—this will also negatively affect battery life. By forcing your phone to close apps and then reopen them all the time, it has to do more work than if you just left them open.

Related: Key Tips to Save Battery Life on Your iPhone

Imagine turning off your phone every time you put it back in your pocket, then having to turn it back on when you needed it again. This would be inefficient and waste power—and it's exactly what you're doing on a smaller scale with swiping to close apps.

4. Closing Apps Makes the App Switcher Less Useful

The App Switcher becomes less useful when you constantly swipe all your apps closed. The point of the switcher is making it easy to access apps that you just had open. When it's always empty, you have to launch apps through your Home screen or Spotlight search every time.

This wastes your time, especially for apps that aren't on your primary Home screen or Dock.

5. Apple Says It's Unnecessary

If you aren't convinced by all of the above, perhaps confirmation from Apple itself will change your mind.

The lack of a Close All button on the App Switcher implicitly speaks to how Apple intends this feature to work. If the company recommended closing all your apps regularly, it would likely make this easier to do with such a button.

Apple's support page on how to close apps states that "you should close an app only if it’s unresponsive." If closing apps all the time helped your iPhone, Apple would make this clear.

Finally, in 2016, 9to5Mac shared an email that someone sent to Tim Cook, asking if closing iOS apps frequently is a good idea and necessary for battery life. Craig Federighi, Apple's Senior VP of Software Engineering, replied with "No and No."

Obviously, the person who heads up the design of iOS has a good idea of how it works.

When You Should Close iPhone Apps

Hopefully, you now see why you shouldn't close iPhone apps all the time. However, there are still times when closing an app is a good idea.

As mentioned above, closing an app is helpful if it's frozen or not responding. If an app seems stuck for whatever reason, closing it and trying again is a simple troubleshooting step.

Related: Reasons Your iPhone Is Slow and How to Fix It

You can also close apps that do run in the background when you're done using them. On iOS, the only apps that run like this are music players, navigation apps, audio recorders, and similar. So if you're playing music in Spotify and want it to stop, you can swipe to close the app immediately.

Another practical use for closing some apps occasionally is tidying up your App Switcher. If you opened an app you don't use very often, it's fine to remove it from the switcher so it's easier to swap between apps you use more frequently.

The final category you should close is apps that might try to abuse their privileges and stay running in the background, like Facebook. But if you don't trust an app to play by the rules of iOS, you should uninstall it from your phone.

Check the Background App Refresh Menu

While most iPhone apps don't actively run in the background, many can still fetch new data when you're not using them thanks to Background App Refresh. For instance, a news app might update its headlines so they're fresh when you open the app, or a cloud storage service might back up your photos.

If you don't want this to happen, head to Settings > General > Background App Refresh. There, you can choose which apps can update in the background and whether to enable this function on Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi and mobile data. See our guide to Background App Refresh for more details.

Stop Closing Apps on Your iPhone Constantly

You shouldn't swipe away all the apps in the App Switcher. Doing so prevents iOS from running as intended, wastes power by forcing apps to reload for no reason, and makes switching between apps less convenient. Apple has stated in multiple places that it's unnecessary, so you should stop doing it.

If you find yourself swiping apps as part of an addiction to your iPhone, there are some easy ways to use your device less often.