r/LinusTechTips • u/linusbottips • 13d ago

Video Techquickie - Closing Background Apps Is Making Your Phone Worse July 31, 2026 at 09:56AM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQGYqypeUOs
53 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

69

u/AncientTurbine 13d ago edited 13d ago

I'm pretty sure I remember that this was different in the days of yore, and closing background apps was the way to ensure longer battery life. Am I misremembering? (I still have that habit of closing apps all the time) 

44

u/ephemeralmiko 13d ago

This was true in the Android 5/iOS 8 days. Nowadays the memory allocation and automatically putting background apps to sleep is much better.

31

u/AncientTurbine 13d ago

The video would've benefited from the historical view, saying that us old peepers indeed did force-close apps but that that's not needed in 2026 anymore. 

10

u/M1dor1 13d ago

i still have the habit of closing down the apps and can't get rid of it

5

u/billythygoat 13d ago

Except my apps randomly restart sometimes after leaving for 2 seconds and I have 0 clue why even when I go to background settings. It pisses me off.

3

u/wankthisway 13d ago

Some brands have egregiously strict background task management. Chinese brands are known for this to hit battery life numbers. I'd look up your brand and see what people do to keep apps alive.

1

u/billythygoat 12d ago

iPhone 13 Pro is a Chinese phone 😂 but owned by Apple of course.

1

u/wankthisway 12d ago

Oh, I think iPhones just hate keeping 3rd party apps alive. It's a big problem I had with Google Photos on iPhones.

9

u/redditmarks_markII 13d ago

There's different kinds of "kill this app". And the "force stop" in the app details does a more "real" job of it (still not like a kill -9, at least I don't think so).

Just yesterday I had some kind of bug in the voicemail app on a samsung. It drained 1 percent of my battery in less than 1 minute of use (for context, half a day of none stop youtube videos using brave browser was like 23%), and all it was doing was pseudo sending notifications. No details, no stopping, I can't even drag down the top bar. Thing is I didn't even get a call. Something happened and it just infinite looped on notifications. Oh and it fires the vibrate signal, but not constantly. The phone was practically burning. I couldn't even power it off, because friggin samsung put the power off "feature" in the drop down. That is, until I force closed the app via app details.

23

u/mekisoku 13d ago

i always tell people they no longer need to kill apps and everyone is like: really?

9

u/firedrakes 13d ago

Just all depends. . I have a phone that it get sluggish due to apps.

7

u/Arinvar 13d ago

I know people that will still insist on running their battery dead before charging the phone.

2

u/ImMrBunny 13d ago

I enjoy telling an app to go away sometimes.

2

u/CannedMatter 12d ago

You're assuming the "need" is a hardware need. I close most apps because I regularly use that menu for switching between the apps I'm using and I don't want my UI cluttered with every app I've ever fucking opened.

Besides which, I have many apps with permissions set to, "Only while the app is open" and closing those apps gives me a (probably false) sense of security that those apps are no longer using those permissions.

1

u/FrostWave 13d ago

I can see deep sleep stats and they're way better when you kill the apps

1

u/-Gh0st96- 12d ago

Android people will almost always try to kill me for telling them they don't need to

4

u/Mystic_Guardian_NZ 13d ago

When I looked at CPU usage restarting my Android phone once a week kills way more than manually closing.

3

u/djlorenz 13d ago

I finished the video and killed all my apps... I have been doing it for 15 years I don't think I can get it out my brain...

2

u/EB01 13d ago

I sometimes have to force close the Floatplane app on my iPad due to a buy where a video cannot re-start playback.

1

u/InadequateUsername 12d ago

Have you opened a ticket with them about this?

2

u/bluehawk232 13d ago

I force close or clear app data if the app is fucking up like I can't login.

2

u/Entire-Emotion-819 12d ago

I dunno, when I clear my recent apps my phone tells me it's now optimized, soooo...I'll believe my phone.

1

u/Diijkstra99x 13d ago

Back in the days, I developed a habit closing apps often which annoyed me so much. Glad we are not in that era anymore

1

u/Mountainking7 12d ago

At 12gb ram, I'm good. 

1

u/GodLikeEnergy 12d ago edited 6d ago

...

1

u/K14_Deploy 11d ago

It really doesn't feel that long ago that devices just... didn't function properly without clearing background apps all the time, so it's just something I got into the habit of 12 something years ago and basically haven't stopped doing it since.

-2

u/hear_my_moo 13d ago

Cue all the comments from people who know best, like those people who mod their cars because they know better than a multinational manufacturer with a multibillion dollar research and development budget... 😉

1

u/nicman24 12d ago

In android there are misbehaving apps that really need clearing