Don't Close Android Phone Apps This Wrong Way

Many people believe that frequently swiping away and closing apps on Android smartphones is akin to ending processes on a personal computer, freeing up memory, improving performance, and extending battery life. However, technical experts have clarified that this belief is inaccurate, emphasizing that the opposite is true in most cases.

According to a technical analysis published by MakeUseOf, smartphones are high-frequency devices that users interact with dozens of times a day, making it beneficial for the system to keep apps in random access memory (RAM) to ensure sustained performance. This is particularly important because energy consumption is a sensitive factor on mobile devices, unlike on desktop computers. When a user swipes away and closes an app, they terminate its process entirely and free up its allocated memory. However, Android already performs this task automatically by “sleeping” unused apps to free up resources for active or recently used applications.

Processor monitoring tools reveal that reopening an app from a full close (cold start) consumes significantly more energy than resuming it from a sleep state. During a cold start, CPU usage spikes to nearly 100 percent, compared to only about 50 percent when resuming from sleep. This explains why users who frequently close apps experience higher phone temperatures and reduced battery performance.

For those who genuinely wish to reduce an app’s background resource consumption, Android provides a dedicated tool: disabling background execution for individual apps via the settings menu, rather than resorting to repeated manual closures. However, this option may have a side effect, as users might miss notifications associated with the affected app.

• Disable the “Allow background activity” option (or set it to “Restricted” on Samsung phones).

There remains one exception where experts permit manually closing an app: when the app freezes, slows down, or behaves abnormally. In such cases, it is similar to using “End Task” in Windows or “Force Quit” in macOS, as reloading the app from scratch helps resolve most unexpected issues.