I’ve found the knowledge level of Apple’s geniuses, in general, ain’t what it used to be.
I’m going to be contrarian, here, but after 30+ years of using computers I’m extremely conservative. I always “force-quit” IOS apps if I know I won’t be using them later in the day. Too many of them are not courteous. Yes, it’s gotten better but, no, I still don’t trust them. And, yes, I shut down my iPhone every night. It gets plugged-in to recharge and then shut-down. This way, I know it’s fully charged in the morning and I won’t be awakened by a robocall at 3am. Oh! Use Do Not Disturb you say? You have to set it up, you have to remember that it’s active, you have to paw around to turn it off if you’re staying up late and expecting a call from the lottery. Just turn the phone off. Simple. And if you must know, I do the same on the Mac. I design systems so I don’t want unexpected effects from software that has nothing to do with what I’m working-on. 4 or 5 apps max. And while we’re at it what’s with these people with 50 tabs open in their browser? 
Talk about resource consumption! Me? One. If I need to compare and contrast I open another window.
I’m not at all convinced that the average user will substantially affect their battery life over the course of years by quitting the apps. Unless, of course, they use hundreds a day.
As I said, contrarian.
Dave
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At 81 forgetting to zip is the least of my worries!
Both. Battery life is defined by the number of recycle charges it goes through. The deeper the recharge the more cycles are used. If you recharge at 50% then that’s half a cycle.
I am not an app quitter, except for Waze as mentioned by @Matt_McCaffrey A month ago on my iPad I tired of the amount of battery loss it got while I did not use it. It was on WiFi at the time. I did not have time to research what was going on so I turned on Airplane mode just to see what happened. It amazed me to see that after two days it still boasted 100%. So on iPad I have developed a new nervous tick.
I am unaware of a second way to QUIT an app other than “flipping it away” within the App Switcher. Am I missing something or is “quit” and “force quit” just a matter of semantics?
The point is, apart from crashes, there’s no real need to ‘quit’ an app on iOS.
The whole concept of “quit” barely exists in iOS.
When you press the home button (or whatever the gesture is on FaceID devices) to switch to the launchpad or another app, what was running goes into the background. It receives a few messages from the system to save its state and then (unless it is explicitly requesting permission to continue in the background) it is suspended.
Its memory remains allocated in case you want to switch back to it, but that memory can be purged at any time if some other app needs it.
When you switch back to the app, if its memory has been purged, then the app will restart itself, using the data it save in order to recover its state.
When you do a “force quit”, you immediately put it in the suspended state and purge its memory. But, as others have already mentioned, this happens automatically as you work with other apps unless the app has explicitly requested permission to run in the background. Some apps have abused the privilege (Facebook seeps to be a particularly notorious abuser), and I’m all for force-quitting those apps, but for most, it shouldn’t be necessary unless you’re seeing actual problems.
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Raised this with my family… amazing the resistance to dropping this particular habit.
I could swear I read a tidbits article back in the early iPhone days suggesting that leaving apps open came at a cost of memory and background processing. I could swear !!! 
I think people like doing it, the swipe up is easy and oddly appealing. Very easy to repeat rapidly.
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I have been disappointed with iOS 13 on my iPhone 7 since its first installation. On day one it want wonky and drained 70% of my battery in 30 min while still connected to a 1 Amp charger. I did a full reset to recover.
My use case is Runkeeper in airplane mode with only bluetooth enabled (for heart rate) and GPS tracking. During a one hour period the battery drain was 50% higher than the week before on iOS12. And yes I did a force quit of all the apps at the start, however it still showed 100% battery after force quitting everything else. For longer durations I often have an external battery pack connected.
The other reason I force quit the apps is that the HRV4Training app does not release it’s bluetooth connection so that I can use Runkeeper with my Polar heart rate strap…
I believe the battery life issue comes up when reloading the apps, not when quitting them. In the reload situation I have access to external power, so I am not as concerned.
I am suspicious that iOS13 also has behind the scenes RF activity pinging other neighboring devices that may be affecting battery life. I don’t have a spectrum analyzer and screen room to check.
I did go through multiple procedures to try and improve the battery performance up to and including a wipe and reinstall. (Where I discovered a full phone backup on my Mac wasn’t really full).
Bottom line for me is reopening apps that I forced quit uses less than 1% of my battery power and since I don’t do it very often I don’t see it as the biggest problem for my battery life.
Also, I agree it is therapeutic to quit apps!
Perhaps like biting one’s fingernails, though that’s demonstrably more effective for preserving iPhone battery life. :-)
I don’t believe this holds up if you look at it in the reverse.
That is, if there is no downside to having every single app open on an iOS device (and presumably this will conceivably happen if someone uses an app if but once) then one would presume that Apple would implement a background launch of every app on your device when it’s on power. Or even an auto-relaunch when you quit an app. Like why not? Launch when you have no battery issues.
The thing is, there’s a point where the open apps will no longer be able to remain in RAM. Whether thats through the total number of apps and/or the RAM required by each app (like games). So if you can’t keep everything in RAM then you’re more likely to need to have it reload anyway when you switch to any other app. I don’t see how this is better.
And this assumes that every app on a device is well behaved and/or optimised for the iOS version you happen to be using.
Yes there’s a balance that is optimal. Quitting out of habit isn’t the best on one’s battery. However Apple doesn’t offer high RAM model iOS devices like one can get with Android devices. At which point there’s a line where the gains of not quitting are lost. Especially once every app (or whatever that line is) has opened. Restart your iPhone and everything opens! I don’t see how that offers optimal anything.
I’m siding with the naysayers here. There doesn’t seem to be much downside to using this “feature” (which I’ll have to admit, I really just thought of as quitting, even though I knew it was a force quit). I can say without doubt that the drain on my battery – macOS or iOS – has much more to do with what I’m doing than with whether I’m letting things sit in memory.
But another reason I quit out of apps on my phone is that I really don’t want to have a lot of processes monitoring location and so on. We all can spot an app that doesn’t work right, but what about apps that don’t act right? And articles I’ve read recently point out clearly that some companies have no problem gathering as much info as they can about you.
If there isn’t a stability problem created by force quitting apps, I can live with a little energy inefficiency.
The question is asked, why do people force quit apps.
When I bought my new Apple iPhone X, I was taught that is the way to close an app when I was done with it if I wasn’t going to use it for a substantial time.
After reading this new article, I get the impression that even if I have 25 apps open I should just leave them all open because they’re really on standby — is that correct? Is that the message that is being communicated?
Yes, and yes.
This keeps being brought up. But I really don’t get it. It’s almost as if people were advocating we should shut off our iPhones entirely whenever we’re not actively using them. This is absurd. Apple has built tools into iOS precisely so we maintain granular control over our own data without resorting to all-or-nothing approaches.
Specifically, that’s what these two are for
- Settings > General > Background App Refresh
- Settings > Privacy > Location Services
Make use of them. So you can stop using iPhone as if it were some cheapo Android.
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You can even multi touch it and swipe as many as you can get a finger on.
Sometimes you just want to get rid of the clutter.
What clutter? There’s really no reason to be in there unless an app is misbehaving. That app will likely be the first or second app in there. Many apps after that? Who cares. Users really have no business being back there. The home screen is the app launcher. As long as it’s well organized launching an app from there should easily be many times faster than trying to sift through the app switcher’s history and finding it in there.
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