How to Close Out Apps on iPhone: What You Need to Know
Closing apps on an iPhone sounds simple — and it is — but there's more nuance here than most people expect. Whether you're troubleshooting a frozen app, managing battery anxiety, or just curious how the app switcher actually works, understanding what's really happening under the hood changes how you approach it.
What "Closing an App" Actually Means on iPhone
When you press the Home button or swipe up from the bottom of the screen, an app doesn't fully shut down — it enters a suspended state. iOS is designed this way deliberately. Suspended apps sit in memory but use almost no CPU or battery. They're essentially paused, waiting to be picked up exactly where you left off.
Fully closing an app — what Apple calls "force quitting" — removes it from memory entirely. The next time you open it, it launches fresh from scratch.
This distinction matters because it shapes when closing apps is actually useful versus when it's unnecessary.
How to Close Apps on iPhone: Step-by-Step 📱
iPhones with Face ID (iPhone X and later, no Home button)
- From any screen, swipe up from the bottom edge and pause in the middle of the screen.
- The App Switcher opens, showing a carousel of your recent apps as cards.
- Swipe left or right to find the app you want to close.
- Swipe the app card upward toward the top of the screen.
- The app disappears from the switcher — it's now fully closed.
You can close multiple apps at once by using multiple fingers to swipe several cards up simultaneously.
iPhones with a Home Button (iPhone SE, iPhone 8 and earlier)
- Double-press the Home button to open the App Switcher.
- You'll see the same card-style view of your recent apps.
- Swipe left or right to navigate between apps.
- Swipe a card upward to close that app.
The gesture is the same — the difference is just how you get into the App Switcher.
When You Should (and Shouldn't) Force Quit Apps
This is where a lot of iPhone users operate on a myth: that closing all your apps regularly improves battery life and speed. Apple's own guidance says the opposite is true for most situations.
Here's why:
- Suspended apps use negligible resources. iOS aggressively manages memory, automatically purging apps it needs to free up space.
- Relaunching a closed app uses more battery than resuming a suspended one, because the phone has to rebuild the app's state from scratch.
- Constantly force quitting apps can actually slow your phone down, not speed it up.
When closing an app genuinely helps:
| Situation | Why Closing Helps |
|---|---|
| App is frozen or unresponsive | Clears the stuck process so it relaunches clean |
| App is behaving oddly or crashing | Forces a fresh start, clearing temporary state |
| App is actively using your location or microphone in the background | Stops that specific background activity |
| You want to clear a login or reset a session | Closing ensures the app's active memory is wiped |
When closing apps doesn't help (and may hurt):
| Situation | Why It Doesn't Help |
|---|---|
| "Improving" battery life in general | Suspended apps aren't drawing meaningful battery |
| "Speeding up" your phone | Suspended apps load faster than re-launched ones |
| Routine app maintenance | iOS handles this automatically |
Background App Refresh: The Setting Worth Knowing
If your concern is apps doing things in the background — syncing, fetching data, using your location — force quitting isn't the right tool. The right tool is Background App Refresh.
You can find it at: Settings → General → Background App Refresh
From there, you can turn off background activity for individual apps or all apps at once. This gives you granular control without disrupting how the app switcher and multitasking work.
Some apps have their own background permissions worth reviewing:
- Location access — Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services
- Notifications — Settings → Notifications → [App Name]
These settings do more to control what apps are "doing" than closing them from the switcher ever will. 🔋
A Note on Older iPhones and Limited RAM
The calculus shifts slightly on older iPhone models with less RAM (2GB or under, generally pre-iPhone 8 range). On these devices, iOS has less breathing room to hold apps in memory, so apps may reload more frequently regardless of whether you closed them or not.
If you're using an older device and notice apps constantly reloading their state when you switch back to them, that's typically a RAM limitation, not something force quitting will fix. In fact, on a memory-constrained device, strategic app closing makes even less difference because iOS is already evicting apps from memory on its own.
The Variables That Shape Your Experience
How useful — or pointless — it is to close apps regularly depends on several factors specific to you:
- Which iPhone model you're using — newer models with more RAM handle multitasking more gracefully
- Which iOS version is running — Apple has refined background management significantly over major iOS releases
- Which specific apps you use — some apps are better-behaved than others in how they use background resources
- Whether any apps are actively misbehaving — a buggy or poorly coded app may genuinely need to be force quit more often than a well-maintained one
- How you use your phone — power users running many apps simultaneously have a different experience than someone using two or three apps
Understanding the mechanics gives you a clearer picture of what's actually happening on your device — but what's worth changing in your own habits depends on the phone you're holding, the apps you run, and what problem, if any, you're actually trying to solve.