Last week, Apple’s top brass put to rest a widely held misconception. The common practice of closing all the apps on your iPhone really doesn’t do anything to improve the phone’s battery life.
But what about Android phones? Well, who better to answer that question than Google’s head of Android, Hiroshi Lockheimer?
After a friend reached out on Twitter to ask if the same rule held true for Android, I tagged Lockheimer in my response. And today (Mar. 14), he responded pretty categorically:
“Thrash,” in the context of a computer, has nothing to do with heavy metal. It’s when a hard drive becomes overworked from moving information between the device’s memory and virtual memory, meaning it could actually slow your phone down to be constantly closing apps for no reason.
I double-checked that Lockheimer was suggesting that Android owners just leave apps open (assuming they hadn’t crashed):
So there it is. Unless an app is actively misbehaving, the head of Android suggests just leaving them all be.