Thoughts on John Gruber’s iPhone app killing practice column
John Gruber wrote a fantastic piece yesterday (7/19/17) on why people should not be killing iPhone apps that are in the background.
I have seen many people going to Task Manager all the time to kill background apps thinking doing that would save them phone battery.
If you know enough about how iOS works, you realize this is not true. iOS is super efficiently designed to limit resource usage of background applications in such a way that it doesn’t affect battery life at all. iOS puts background applications in “freeze” mode which significantly restricts what that app can do. The operating system ensures that only certain limited services are being used by the app like location services (if you allowed it in the first place). When you switch to a background app, iOS can quickly resurrect the app to the foreground in the state it was earlier and run very smoothly as if it has been running in the background actively all the time. When you kill the app, you are basically taking away that efficiency and are making iOS to freshly start the app, which actually consumes more energy and processor power than if it had been kept in freeze mode.
In my opinion, there are 2 reasons why people kill background apps.
- iOS is so well designed and efficient that switching to a background app is so fast and smooth that people assume it has always been active in the background
- iPhone battery life is short
The first one is the result of some great software engineering that Craig Federighi’s team at Apple does. It’s not an overstatement to say that iOS is the best mobile operating system ever designed. Most of the time, “it just works” and disappears in the background by letting the users enjoy whatever they are doing on the phone.
The second one is the result of Apple’s unnecessary obsession towards “thinner and lighter” approach. It is a result of Jony Ive’s obsession to make everything smaller and leaner. Yes, an iPhone without a case looks marvelous and its unbelievable that something of that size could do so much. However, it is also true that every single iPhone user starts worrying about the phone dying off too soon before the day ends. I consider myself an average user, I stay in an office during my day and my phone is connected to a strong WiFi signal. I probably make/receive 1 or 2 phone calls a day each one lasting not more than 2 or 3 minutes. My phone gets to almost 30% by 3 PM every day. I am simply not comfortable with this. I know most users aren’t. This is precisely what is driving this app closing behavior from users. I will gladly have a phone that is 3 mm thicker so it can have a bigger battery to support my normal day. But Jony Ive doesn’t think that way unfortunately.
