Should I manually close all apps after using them?

I’m an iOS user so far but looking into switching to /e/. On iOS it’s counter-productive to manually close apps but I hear that people on Andoid do that.

What’s the recommended behaviour?

both Apple and Google have confirmed that closing your apps does absolutely nothing to improve your battery life. In fact, says Hiroshi Lockheimer, the VP of Engineering for Android, it might make things worse.”

(https://www.wired.com/2016/03/closing-apps-save-battery-makes-things-worse/)

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Cool so I take it that holds for /e/os as well then. Thanks a lot!

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Yes.
All Android OSes out there including Custom ROMs like /e/OS are based on what Google releases as the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), so while they might look pretty different they all share the same basic groundwork.

That being said, I am closing Apps all the time myself, because I just can’t get un-used to it, and as far as I’ve seen through my smartphone journey whatever you do in this regard should neither wreck nor save battery life noticeably. I haven’t seen any other negative effects of closing Apps either in the Android realm.

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Thank you for taking the time to explain! I will keep my habit of not caring then :slight_smile:

I close everything immediately. Maybe there’s no impact on speed, but on memory consumption in every case. There are also applications which have more consequences: running services as long as the app is running, especially the location service (GPS and more). I don’t want that. What’s not running can’t also not harm.

Interesting. On iOS, apps can’t just do anything they want in the background and have to register special routines with the OS for that. Only those run when they have to and, to my understanding, those have to be restarted when you close the app. Apparently that is not the case with Android? So my question: when I kill an app (push it up) - is it really fully stopped and nothing is started without me starting the app?

Not always.
I’m used to check the battery-eating apps, once or twice a day, using Settings/Battery/Usage.
And sometimes a “pushed-up” app is still running (the “Stop App” button is not greyed out).
NB : some of the apps I kill using this “Stop App” function have a difficult restart (have to restart twice).

I’m not sure about which apps stay active when “pushed-up”, it seems to me that they often have unfinished business (like a browser with an animated or auto-refresh page, or an app I pushed-up without waiting for current operation to finish).

Hmm. Seems like I will have to see if “not caring” just works for me. Thanks again for all the input!

What sort of register would that be?

In my experience with /e/ (and a bit of IOS as well) “background activity” happens exactly there: in the background… and to some extend also independent from the app being “open” or “closed” (depending on the app’s purpose or needs), by “closing” I refer to “swiping off” not to forced stop or kill in system settings.

For instance in my case in /e/ the signal messaging app is a real battery eater and I only sometimes allow it to use battery in the background (as per system settings) when I really need/want it (which means most of the time I accept delayed messages as they only come in when I actively open the app)

Look at the Music app. When pushed into background it still plays it’s stuff. Look a GPS tracker. When pushed into background and tracking has been on it will still track you. And it can keep the location service running even when you stopped the tracking (or never started it, depends on how you configured your device). Similar with apps like PeakLens or even Camera when you have geo tagging of your taken pictures switched on. - As long as apps can run in background it’s a good idea to terminate them when they are not in use.

Not in every case the app is really killed. For instance the mail apps (all), messengers, SMS app keep running even when you push them up, they must, you expect that. But the number of such apps is limited.

Okay so I summarize: it aint that simple. Reminds me a little of the situation when you ask a group of beekeepers a question. You get at least three answers that totally contradict each other ^^ Anyway thanks everyone for your input. I guess I do start understanding!

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:grin: … well … Yes, as the saying goes … If two of us beekeepers share the same opinion be sure one of us has no clue at all…

Edit: but in this case I think it breaks down to variations of “closing an app” and its consequences :slightly_smiling_face:

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@obacht you’re a beekeeper as well? Another case of very poor implementation of the Matrix randomization algorithms :joy: :joy:

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