Why You Shouldn’t Make a Habit of Force-Quitting iOS Apps or Restarting iOS Devices

An Apple engineer told me that rigorous internal testing revealed such actions as being the major cause of shortened battery life and I’ve heard from dozens of users who have found it to make a significant difference in their charging needs.

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Battery life. That’s enough to convince me to no longer force quit my apps. I was among those few who in the original conversation here admitted regular force quitting and shutting down at the end of the day. My reasoning was because I thought leaving the apps running was using valuable RAM. I have since learned the error of my ways. Haven’t shut down my heavily used iPad in ten days although I find that I still have to plug it in after about ten hours of browsing and reading. Pretty much the same with my Mac Air although I rarely shut down that machine. I been using Macs since my first Mac Plus in 1986 and possibly these are holdover behaviors from those days…

Actually, the bigger culprit on recent laptops is the mostly hidden Local TimeMachine backups! See this article https://www.howtogeek.com/212207/how-to-free-up-space-used-by-time-machines-local-backups-on-your-mac/ and this one: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204015

I needed to free up a lot of space on my hard drive, so I deleted my mail archives (80gb). That took enough time that the storage was copied into local snapshot, so the data wasn’t visible to me, but I still didn’t have the needed disk space (until I cleared the local snapshots.) That was Very Frustrating, it took me a couple hours to figure this out, remove the old data, and then restore from backups.

A utility to automatically purge stuff that’s been in the trash for a long time helps enormously. Especially since your Trash probably contains a mix of stuff you just deleted (which you’d probably want to keep for a little while) and stuff you deleted a while ago (which you can probably get rid of).

On any relatively-current macOS releases (including Sierra), there is a Finder preference for “Remove items from the Trash after 30 days”.

What I like even better is what Windows does. Its Recycle Bin properties page has a setting where you pick a maximum size. When the total amount of data in it exceeds the maximum, the system will remove those files that have been in there for the longest amount of time, as necessary to bring the total size below the maximum.

A friend of mine developed (many years ago) a macOS package to implement the Windows semantics for trash management (including many more advanced configuration options), called Compost. It hasn’t been updated for a very long time and is only 32-bit (so it’s incompatible with Catalina), but the core functionality still works great on my Macs running Sierra. I’m going to really miss it when I buy new Macs that won’t be able to run it.

I never get this. How can people forget to empty their trash? How can they forget to do so even when they’re running out space? You need an app to automatically empty your trash? Jeeze Louise. Do you need an app to remind you to zip your fly when you leave the stall too? I mean c’mon. /rant

ROFL, You are right on!

The Mac App Hazel gives excellent trash control as one of it’s many options.

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The “Empty Trash” command is overkill. As I wrote, it deletes both things that you trashed an hour ago (which you might want to keep for a while) and things that you trashed a year ago (which should be perfectly safe to delete).

The apps I’m talking about don’t just empty the entire trash on a timer. They selectively delete individual files based on how long it has been since they were moved to the trash (or in the case of Compost, other criteria).

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My comment wasn’t aimed at you specifically. I do get your argument about more selective deleting.

Personally, I rigorously empty the trash because I like to keep things tidy. Sure, new removals get flushed too that way and maybe some a bit too quick. But if I really need to get them back, well I just turn to TM for that.

Is that battery life as in the battery needs to be recharged or does it include battery life as in the battery needs to be replaced? For the first years of my iPad Air 2’s life, I routinely quit apps. Now the battery does not last nearly as long as it did. (Side story. An Apple genius told me that installing the then-latest iOS would solve my problem, absolutely. After installing the latest iOS, he said that fixed it as the battery dropped 4% in under 10 seconds. But the Apple diagnostic tool said the battery was alright, and he believed the diagnostic tool rather than his own eyes.)

That’s what I use, but because I delete (what I consider to be) too much trash to sift through, every day or two I create a folder named trashyyyymmdd (where yyyymmdd is the current date, of course), put it in the trash, and then copy any loose items into it. That sorts files and folders in the trash by when they were deleted. It works for me.

I am indeed.

I’m not saying it isn’t true…just that I remain unconvinced and I’ve never seen any kind of quantitative numbers on it.

Just wait until you’re old…you’ll get this disease known as CRS for Can’t Remember Sxxx…Ima not gonna say you’ll forget to zip up but I will say it’s amazin’ what you’ll ferget.

I don’t have an empty my trash app…generally if I put something in the trash it’s because I don’t want it any more and it gets emptied.

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I clealy don’t know your specific situation, but it is well known that iOS has severe battery drain for a few days after any major system software upgrade. It usually returns to normal a few days after the upgrade.

I’m not sure what causes this drain, but it seems to happen whenever there is an upgrade. My best guess is that is doing something to the entire file system that consumes power and takes a while to complete. Maybe indexing everything for search or re-authenticating the certificates for every app. Or maybe performing a detailed check on the file system.

I would love to know the actual cause, but so far I haven’t found anything more reliable than my own speculation.

I restart my iPhone 11 Pro Max daily. I do it for a specific reason. I add music to my iTunes library frequently, and often have a large number of songs I’ve never listened to. So, I have a smart playlist (playcount < 1) that holds all my unheard songs, and removes a song as soon as I’ve listened to it (almost always from my iPhone while on my daily walks). The problem is that it doesn’t update the Playcount and Last Played fields in the iTunes library on other devices unless I reboot the phone, and it still doesn’t update for that session until the next time I play a new song. I’ve tried just quitting Music, I’ve tried waiting a day, I’ve tried other things - the only thing that reliably works is powering down the phone and then powering it back up. That was true on my iPhone X also. Music isn’t the greatest app I’ve ever used, to be kind - I still haven’t figured out how to create a new playlist on the Mac and have it appear on the iPhone, extremely annoying - new music in the library shows up fine (sometimes without artwork), but new playlists, nope, and I’ve tried a lot of tactics to force it to happen.

I don’t doubt you, but this is the first I’ve heard of this phenomenon. It would explain what I saw, but I’m surprised the Apple genius didn’t warn me about it or mention it after the fact.

For what it’s worth, the battery drain seemed to improve (compared to what had prompted me to visit the Apple Store) in the following weeks. Of course, I have no detailed notes and I coddle the iPad now because I believe it has a weak battery.

I’ve found the same thing. I’ve deleted it from my iPad a few years ago. I still occasionally use it on my iPhone for traffic reports, which I think are better than Apple or Google Maps, but otherwise I keep the settings off as much as I can.

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:laughing: I had to literally laugh out loud when I read that. What a mental image! Thanks for the laugh, Sir. :+1:

“Well known” may be an overstatement. I’ve seen it on very iOS device I’ve ever owned for over a decade, and others have reported similar symptoms, but I have yet to see it formally documented.

I bet I could find an “Apple engineer” who’d say never empty your trash on a laptop because it uses so much battery energy and needlessly exercises your HD or SSD too. :grinning: