 Do you compulsively force close your apps, trying to save battery life, or make your phone more efficient? So what does exiting apps actually do? It turns out, closing your apps doesn't help, and actually, it's bad for your phone. Apple's Senior VP of Software Craig Federighi reportedly answered this question to a user in 2016. In an email, he said closing apps isn't necessary and it doesn't help with battery life. Apple explicitly says on its support pages that users should only force close apps when they're unresponsive. Meanwhile, Hiroshi Lockheimer, the Senior Vice President of Platforms and Ecosystems at Google, tweeted a similar thought last year. In his tweets, he said users shouldn't close out of apps because the operating system already manages what they do in the background. It closes apps when necessary and slows them down into background activity. Just to confirm all this, I talked to an independent iOS developer, Ish Shabazz, and he said, What happens when you do the double click, what you're seeing is a screenshot, right? It's a screenshot of the last AP app was in. So the app usually is not running anymore. And the app will wake it up when it needs to run, if need be, but it actually will shut it down after just a few seconds, maybe like 10 seconds or so. Keeping your apps open in the background means your phone can hold them up more quickly as if they were just asleep and you're waking them up. Relaunching every app requires more work and battery power. Although if data usage matters to you, having apps on in the background will use up some data, but not that much. If you care about your device, you'll defer to Google and Apple's software management systems. They were designed to help. Listen, I hate that this is the truth. I'm going to try to keep my apps open, but in reality, I know I'm going to feel the urge to close them. And guess what? I'm probably going to do it.