This appears to be the core of the issue. People are using the app switcher to launch their apps instead of the home screen.
The app switcher is good for switching to the previous app (or perhaps the one before that), but it’s not good as a launcher. Using it as a launcher seems to be what triggers the unnecessary / mildly harmful behavior the article bemoans. If people resorted to using the home screen as a launcher and used the app switcher only for switching to the previous app there would be no reason to force quit well behaved apps.
Now if people turn around and say, but hey I do that because the home screen sucks as a launcher, well then Apple probably has some urgent homework to engage in.
Indeed, and for those with a Face ID device, swiping left and right on the bar at the bottom of the screen is an even more effective way of switching back and forth between a couple of apps. Once you get beyond three or four at the most, it’s difficult or impossible to know what app will be “next.” On my iPhone 11 Pro, I use the bottom-swipe switcher absolutely all the time, but usually just with two apps.
I’ve never found the App Switcher particularly useful for switching apps, personally, because although the thumbnails are larger than home screen icons, they’re in an unpredictable order and also variable in their display (depending on what screen was showing when I switched away), so I have to look and parse each one to figure out what it is.
I use the Siri Suggestions (swipe down on the home screen) a fair amount for apps that are buried somewhere among the many apps I have installed. It’s not as predictable as the home screen, but it does a pretty good job of surfacing the right apps. And sometimes I think, “Wow, I need to move that app to the first home screen since I’m using it so much.”
Wow. I didn’t know tvOS had an app switcher. I’ve long wondered how to quite a misbehaving app. Up to now I’ve gone to System and restarted the AppleTV!
Yup. That’s why I use the app launcher/switcher on both iOS and iPadOS. It’s faster to find a recent app in the launcher than using search or scrolling through many home screens some with folders. But, the app launcher/switcher becomes less useful when apps that I haven’t used for days, weeks, months, clutter up the screen. So, as mentioned by others, I keep the launcher populated with the apps I’m currently interested in using and ‘swipe up’ to get rid of others. You could say, why don’t you organize your home screen to have those apps easily available there? But, that would mean re-organizing the home screen at least weekly, and I find moving apps around the home screens fiddly and annoying, so the app launcher is a better solution for me. I’ve so far not been concerned with battery life.
As posted earlier, it’s about behavior, not about the right or wrong way to do something.
Just to be complete for others who do not know about this, double-click the home button to show the app switcher on tvOS. And you can swipe up on the lightning remote to force-close a misbehaving app.
If it’s just an entry in a database or plist file or the like, then there’d be no difference in the load when launching an app fresh or waking it up from the switcher.
Yeah this. I think it depends a lot on how you process and remember visual information; and how much librarian-type arrangements help you. This varies wildly from one individual to another, and I think that is why people use the various ways of accessing apps so differently.
Some people remember the icons of apps, some remember the names, some remember the visual look of the opened app, some remember vaguely that they had a way of doing task X but cant remember at all what part of what app does that. Some regularly use 4 apps, or 6. Some regularly use 20-30.
I have some apps with memorable names, some with memorable icons (very few), many with distinctive visual landscapes. And some whose name is a character set I cannot read, with impenetrable or almost generic icons.
For me, I would quite like my ‘home screen’ to actually be the app switcher. I guess thats why Apple introduced the ‘swiping along the bottom of the screen’ switcher in recent models — though many (most?) people don’t know that exists. For my older iPhone, app switcher is usually close enough as a launcher. Not perfect, but usually better than the avalanche of icons on the home screens. Pull down and search from the home screen is also useful.
It is good that there are multiple ways of getting the job done. And things like Tidbits (and this discussion) are excellent at revealing ones which are not obvious, and warning of side-effects.
Without wishing to drag this thread off topic again, I wanted to respond to something regarding the Trash on the Mac:
You can add a Date Added column to the Trash window in list view and sort by that, to save manually creating folders.
Overall, I was surprised to read how many people are manually managing the Trash on their Mac. I have “Remove items from the Trash after 30 days” set and so I just throw things away and then don’t think of them again. If I find I need them again, I’m likely to realise in the next 30 days, otherwise the system takes care of it for me. Unless I’m running out of space and need to clear out some large files, it’s not worth the hassle of even thinking about emptying the Trash. The less housekeeping I have to do myself, the better!
More on-topic, I’ve found this thread really interesting to read! I’m on the side of ‘don’t force quit or even think about app management unless something isn’t working’, but has been fascinating (and at times surprising!) to see how people approach this. And nice to read such a constructive discussion.
I hate to be a weenie…but sez you. Many folk find it perfectly acceptable as a launcher, I use it sometimes myself. For those folk…in the absence of quantifiable significant battery considerations then we should leave them be. Personally…I could think of several home screen launcher alternatives that I would personally like better…and IMO Apple keeps iOS too locked down by preventing setting a different home screen app, different dzefault mail/web/whatever clients… it they don’t so I just live with it…and like each one of us find my own launch system. For me…it is a single home screen of folders with the most used apps on Home and next most used on the first screen in each folder. After that…it’s search, Siri, or Program Switcher.
Yeah…I know Apple says it is bad for battery life between charges…but it has to be pretty minimal or else people would have noticed it by now. And given the likelihood that whatever app I ran 4 days ago got purged from memory and needs reloading anyway…the extra launch time is a non factor.
I’m not saying Apple is wrong…just that neither are the users who wish to do it this way. I’m not saying the home screen isn’t a great app launcher… it great is in the opinion of the user.
What I am saying…is that the lockdown has all of us waaaay too bored as thee are numerous really long debates about stuff that really doesn’t matter…but it isn’t just here…my photography forum is pretty much doing the same thing:-).
To repeat this one more time. For any app that hasn’t run recently, there is no difference between using the App Switcher or launching from the home screen. The App Switcher is just a list of apps that have been used, in whatever random order they were last accessed, nothing more.
The difference comes with only the most recently accessed apps, which iOS may be maintaining in memory to reduce resource usage and battery life, and to improve performance. There is no way to predict what apps remain in memory and which don’t, except when you force-quit an app, you can be certain that its next use will entail the maximum CPU and resource usage, and thus the maximum battery drain.
I do not believe that this is a Force Quit. A Force Quit is exactly what it sounds like… forcing an application to quit. This is simply a way of Closing an app and iOS will perform necessary/normal tasks in closing the app.
Force Quit is performed via the Home/Power buttons and there are 2 different methods that I know of.
Apps running in the background is exactly the same as on MacOS, where many ‘gurus’ have told us for years that they use almost no power, but this is patently not true. It depends on the app and can be clearly seen in the Activity Monitor. Not only do they use power, but they also use CPU. So they slow your Mac’s performance. However, since 99.9% of users never fully use their Mac’s CPU, it makes little or no difference. For those that do use apps requiring lots of CPU running for extended periods, it does make a difference. Whether you think it’s enough to really matter depends on you as an individual.
Personally, on iOS I will from time to time Close all those apps which are running in the background and which, typically, I almost never use, but I opened for example, 3 months ago, for some reason or other. They are a pointless drain on resources. On the other hand, constantly Closing apps, that you open every day, or even every two or three days, is probably self defeating.
Are you saying that there is no ‘close/quit procedure’ carried out? Is it equivalent to just ‘pulling the plug’, in the same way that PowerButton/HomeButton is?
When you swipe to force-quit, the app is given a signal to gracefully exit. However, in the case of a frozen app, after a period of time, the OS does force-quit the app (like pulling the plug). If the app has been suspended (because it hasn’t been used in a long time), it is merely removed from the app switcher. This is why Apple recommends using this swipe-up procedure for apps that are unresponsive. And they do refer to this procedure as “force quit”. See number 1 here.
This I believe not to be true. As I understand it, iOS is much less forgiving of background processing, and apps are aggressively suspended in the background compared with MacOS, mostly to preserve battery life but also to give the active application as much performance as possible.
You may be thinking about force-restart shortcuts, also mentioned in the article. Those are different and affect the entire device, not just a single app.
Sorry, but that’s not true. macOS allows very different background behavior because there are so many more resources available (faster CPUs, more memory, larger batteries or wall power).
But you are correct that background apps on the Mac can use significant power, so anyone who has said otherwise is wrong.
There’s no harm in doing this, apart from the wasted time you spend doing it, but there’s no benefit either, unless you want fewer items in the App Switcher. iOS ensures that those apps aren’t using any resources.
