The apps you have “running” on your iDevice may actually be eating up a little battery life after all. Apple claims that its solution to multitasking — which is suspending apps rather than having them truly run in the background — is better for battery life. While that may be the case, it seems that having a bunch of apps in the multitasking queue may actually hurt your battery life a little bit after all.According to David Pogue, in his column for the New York Times, keeping a bunch of apps suspended in your multitasking queue is actually sucking up you device’s battery life:
Background apps. Nicole the Genius discovered that my friend had a huge number of apps open – maybe 40 of them. She maintained that they were using battery power, too, in the background … But I’d been led to believe that background apps are generally frozen into suspended animation precisely so that they don’t use battery power … Even so, Nicole quit all 40 of the apps that were still open … The next day, my friend’s battery, by the same time of day (5 p.m.), was still at 80 percent!
This does make sense, as suspending many apps likely does take minimal system resources which add up once you have a bunch of apps in your queue, but it’s hard to say exactly what about multitasking is draining the battery. Nonetheless, it’s easy to clear out your multitasking queue by double-tapping the home button, pressing and holding an app in the queue, and then tapping the “-” in the app’s corner. Of course, you’ll have to do this for a lot of apps if you haven’t been quitting anything with regularity. Nonetheless, it’s better than nothing. Hopefully Apple will add a “quit all” feature at some point down the line, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Four Ways to Make Your Battery Last Longer [New York Times via TUAW]
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