I cant answer for jwking, but for me: it is much easier to recognise apps in the App Switcher than recognising their icons on the home screen. Swiping apps off the App Switcher while I am there takes really no extra effort, and leaves an ordered list of apps I have used — without faffing about ‘organising’ home screens.
‘relatively sure’ is not what I want though. In the absence of an unambiguous interface and discoverable controls, swiping that app away is a trivially easy way of ensuring that the OS knows I am ‘not using’ it.
I have to force-quit the ProCam app. If I forget and don’t shut it down, my battery is often drained before I can look at the Battery Usage list. I guess the app just runs in the background, accessing the camera to set exposure and focus. 
99%* of the IOS interface is neither visible nor easily discoverable, and whether Apple talks about something in its instructions is a poor guide to whether it is necessary or even useful.
So, people who just want to use their device will try a combination of everything they have already learned on other devices, things friends tell them, things they read, and lists of ‘10 weird tricks’. When they find something that appears to work, they stick to it. Judging by Apple’s abandonment of discoverability, this is the behaviour Apple wants to encourage.
I know several people who have never modified their home screen on new phones, after several past rounds of frustration with that process. And it doesn’t matter: they use App Switcher to switch apps (like Apple’s instructions say to); and any newly installed app will appear at the end of the home screens if they really need to find it. And they can easily ‘edit’ App Switcher by swiping up, which they learned in the distant past.
- [invented statistic]
This is the first mention I’ve seen here for the reason I routinely “force quit” apps in iOS:
the gradual accumulation of windows in the app switcher view makes it hard to find the application I’m looking for
Personally, I find the iOS app switcher terrible — only slightly less terrible than having to hunt around the home screen(s) for whatever I’m trying to find — and essentially useless once it has more than three or four things in it. So, when there are more than three or four…things are going to get swiped up and sent away. But I am an extremely lightweight iOS user: touch screens don’t work well at all for me (callouses), so all iOS devices are basically non-starters.
More than a few bytes - also the last page screen shots displayed when you swipe right.
Many apps are unfortunately not ‘well-written’… I hate it when when I return to an app that I’ve been using it has reverted to its generic state. Most of them have correctly saved their files or whatever, but you still have to navigate back to where you were before.
I used to not force quit apps, except iOS and many apps have gotten so bloated and poorly written, that I’m seeing a lot of background battery use on my phone, and have crash issues on my iPad.
With the phone, I periodically will go through and force close all the clutter. Much better to waste a fraction of battery life and time to open something I want to use, than to see my battery drained while my phone should be on stand-by and not doing anything.
With my still mint iPad 6, iOS13 has big memory leaks. I used to not really worry about closing apps nor force restarting, but iOS13 has been absolutely terrible. Once my iPad has been casually used for a week or two, and then I go play a relatively popular MMO game, any of the 4 games I play, the game will crash anywhere from 5-10-20 minutes in, and then crash repeatedly. So, no, it is not just one game that has issues. 4 products. 4 different development teams.
The only thing that works is force closing all apps, force restarting the iPad, and the game will be good for hours and days.
Just restarting the iPad does not work.
Just closing force closing the apps does not work.
All apps need to be quit, then the iPad restarted, and the unit will be fine for a week or two. But, out of habit now, at least once a week, I do the above.
There is just no other way to solve battery drain issues on my Phone nor game crashes on my iPad.
A user has to do what a user has to do when the systems are not working as intended.
I’m with you…I only have one home screen and everything is in folders that are arranged so the most used apps are on the first page in the folder. I launch most apps from either search or the Program Switcher screen. My wife on the other hand has a dozen or so home screens with no organization at all.
I find this interesting. It almost sounds like there’s a sizable crowd of people who don’t consider the home screen really useful as a launcher. I wonder, do you have very many apps?
I don’t have many (about three pages worth). Almost every app I use routinely, is on the first page. If I need an app from another page I’ll sometimes just use search. Especially when that app is in a folder. I don’t like folders (on iOS). I’m not sure why I even use them.
Social discovery is a necessary thing these days. Much of that is simply a logical conclusion of what happens with a small-screen touch-focused user interface. There’s just no room to have visible discoverability of all possible features on an iPhone (at least for non-trivial apps).
But, just as I hope people have learned useful new ways of interacting with their devices from TidBITS over the years, I was hoping that I could discourage a completely unnecessary and mildly harmful habit that people had picked up from uninformed sources. That was wishful thinking in many cases. So be it—apparently you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t making him stop force-quitting apps unnecessarily. :-)
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200 on my Xs Max, although I could probably delete at least half of them. All sorted into 6 folders and 16 apps on my single home screen. The ones I actually use are mostly/kinda on the first folder screen. I only use maybe 10 frequently and they are either on my home screen or found via the Program Switcher screen.
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Likewise. I’ve got a little more than 100 apps, all on a single screen. Most are in folders with the most-commonly-accessed apps directly on the screen, and the absolutely-most-commonly-accessed apps in the Dock region:
- Folders:
- Games
- Internet (Google Maps, YouTube, etc.)
- Media (iBooks, Music, Notes, Photos, etc.)
- Finance (Wallet and apps for my bank accounts and credit cards)
- Reference (IMDB, Mactracker, etc.)
- Shopping (Amazon, App Store, etc.)
- Surveys (I belong to a few survey groups that use apps)
- Travel (AAA, various airlines and hotels)
- Utilities (Settings, Camera, Find Friends, etc.)
- Apps directly on the home screen
- PCalc - A great replacement for Apple’s calculator
- Google Authenticator
- Health
- Calendar
- Clock (I really like the animated watch face on the icon
)
- Apps in the dock region
- Phone
- Messages
- Safari
Another fun thing I did (which I can thank my daughter for), is that I was able to move every icon from the first home screen to the second. So the primary home screen is completely empty (except for the dock-apps). This way it is easy to show people the wallpaper without icons getting in the way.
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This is why I try to get my headphones on as quickly as possible on a flight. Then I won’t be bothered by OCD seat neighbors trying to give me crazy advice on using my iPad. 
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I hugely appreciate all the work you put in — and have put in over the decades — to help us use Apple products more effectively. I owe Tidbits for a lot of the time-saving and more-fun tips I use regularly, and for deeper advice that helps me get the most from things.
I think in this case though, the key is that for many people it is inaccurate to characterise the behaviour as “completely unnecessary” — it is actually a core part of how they use the device. For whatever reason, to get to an app they find App Switcher to be easier to use than the home screen, or dock, or search. And so they ‘clean up’ App Switcher by swiping apps out of the way.
This article has usefully pointed out that it is not necessary for any technical reason, and also that in some cases it may be “mildly harmful”.
As someone who is often asked to help people with computer problems, over the years I have become a bit more sanguine about people’s ingenuity in using their randomly incomplete knowledge of an interface to get a device to do something for them.
Thanks to things like Tidbits, sometimes I can help them with a better way, that solves some of their problems.
Keep leading the horses to water. Sometimes you might have to put salt in their feed though. And sometimes they really aren’t that thirsty.
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i wonder if this applies to macbook pro 2013 as well.
Because my laptop hangs all the tie and I have to force restart every 3-4 hours or so… It pisses me off.
I’m one of those who almost unconsciously quit (I hadn’t thought of it as “force-quit”) apps. I didn’t do it with the idea of conserving memory/CPU, but of making it easier to use the app switcher.
I didn’t just open an app, use it, then force-quit it: I would quit apps that I hadn’t used for a day or two and was reasonably sure I wasn’t going to use for at least another day or two.
Since reading the article I forced myself not to do this, and within a few days found that the app switcher became too crowded to be useful. What was the point of it when it became easier to use the home screen–with my apps neatly organized into folders–to switch?
As has been stated in the article at the top, in the Apple KB support article and repeated maybe a dozen times here, it saves battery life and speeds up the time it takes to re-launch the app. If you don’t care about either of these, then you are certainly free to follow your own needs.
Yes, I understand the concept, but you missed my point: you said the point was “it saves battery life…” etc., but you were responding to my (rhetorical) question of, what then is the point of the application switcher, which is then more cumbersome than just using the home screen? That not force-quitting saves battery life doesn’t make the application switcher any more usable.
There’s also a middle ground, which I’d implied if you read what I wrote with any care: if I’m not going to use a particular app for days at a time, does launching it once or twice a week or less really save battery life or save time?
I believe that the application switcher was designed to quickly switch between two or three applications in the same session. (Plus of course the added force quit gesture.) If I am composing an email and want to paste in a link from safari, I will switch to it, copy the link, switch back to mail to paste it in, then switch back to Safari to copy a portion from the web site, and switch back to mail to paste the quote in. I really don’t believe that Apple intended the application switcher to be an alternate launcher. (It might be interesting to find the first mention of the app switcher from an iOS keynote; that’s probably a hint of Apple’s thoughts on intended use of the feature from their point of view.)
The app switcher in iPadOS is a little more rich, because the same app can have more than one presence in the application switcher, such as having Notes in full screen and also in split screen with another app. After launching notes you may want to switch to one of the other instances.
I know tvOS has its own app switcher, but I only use it when I want to force close a misbehaving app (this happens with the Spectrum app from my cable tv company; quite often it will show an error message on launch that cannot be dismissed, so I need to force close the app.)
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