My mom is also deeply paranoid and superstitious about the phone. I'll be like "why don't you delete this second weather app you don't like that's sending you all these notifications you ignore?" And she'll be like "NO YOU'LL BREAK SOMETHING IT HAS TO TO BE LIKE THIS"
Yeah, my parents actually close all their apps regularly, whereas I have dozens of apps not doing anything in the background since it doesn't really make a difference.
Tons of FOSS apps doing crucial stuff use tricks, like displaying a permanent notification (which you can then mute) to stay awake.
Also, you need to manually set the battery restriction to "unrestricted" for apps, by pretting on the text in the 2 battery options, and setting it away from "optimized".
I think memory management on modern phones is good enough that running apps in the background is no longer an issue. Provided you're not using a piece of shit.
There is a difference between running in the background and being in memory.
Recent Apps may or may not be in memory, that's why when you switch to a "recent" app not used in a while it restarts anyway instead of continuing where you left it, it's effectively just a bookmark to a closed app. So the list being long doesn't mean these apps are using memory.
While running in the background is unrelated, apps can run in the background regardless if they are in the Recents list or not. And it can absolutely cause issues or excessive battery usage, but clearing the Recents list is not the solution.
I've trained everyone in my personal support range to restart their phones and tablets weekly. Flushes out all the apps and noticeably reduces complaints and questions from the users.
But at first they can't find it, then it doesn't play and then the phone doesn't automatically switch in horizontal view, but that's necessary, as they're convinced you can not possibly watch it otherwise. So the whole process takes about half an hour.
i mean from what people complain about it seems they simply don't determine what notifications are important, they just let everything bombard them at all times and whine that they get so many notifications as if it's just a fact of life..
Mobile OSes will ask (and act directly, if ignored) backgrounded apps to dump themselves out to disk to reclaim memory when needed, and the kinds of processing you’re allowed to do while backgrounded are quite limited.
There’s really not much of a performance reason to kill backgrounded apps. Feel free to kill them for other reasons, like unnecessary network traffic or draining your battery by keeping GPS active.
Running Android 14 and somewhat disagree. I have had 1-2 games running in the background after "exiting"/"quitting" the game and dropped from 80-90% battery to 30% in less than 2 hours. (GPS and Bluetooth both disabled). Battery dropped as though I was actively playing with the screen on during that time.
Killing apps has helped me with this issue, in general. However, for the offending game, setting "app battery usage" (specific to Android, not sure of iOS equivalent, if any) has helped better for this issue. Seems a lot of games are trying to load unmecessary stuff and/or sell usage data, despite exiting the game...