Absolutely thunderstruck:

[jrittenhouse]

Originally published at . You can comment here or there.

Meredith showed me a neat trick for my iPhone and iPad, which shows all of the programs that remain loaded and sucking up battery juice on my devices.  HUGE list.  It also allows you to shut the things off - which I promptly did on both.

Comments

[seawasp]

and the trick is...????

[rono_60103]

Press the home button (the one just under the display) twice rapidly. The image on the display will shift up revealing the running apps. Just press and hold one of them until they start bouncing and display an "x" in a red circle. Pressing the x will cause the app to exit and release many of its resources.

[maiac]

Is that why my iPod does that when I press the home button? I thought it was showing me the most recently used apps on the assumption I'd want to switch back to one of them. That's how I've been using it, anyway.

[autopope]

Those apps are suspended but inactive. iOS dumps them from memory automatically whenever it tries to load a new app and discovers it's out of RAM. RAM has to be powered all the time, so killing them doesn't actually save you any power.

AIUI, the only significant exception is apps that use location/data services and receive push notifications -- they have to wake up in the background periodically to update their state, and location services really guzzle juice. But you can stop that happening by denying location service access to apps you see no reason to inform of your location.

Biggest power saver in my experience: switch off 3G or 4G data and location services globally. An iPhone running on GSM/EDGE with no GPS usage has a standby life of over a week.

[rono_60103]

Shortly after we got our iPhones, I was waiting in the hotel lobby at the oversold Town and Country in San Diego trying (and eventually failing) to get our room for Condor. A member of the T&C staff showed me that trick.

[jrittenhouse]

Nice.

[johnridley]

FWIW, that list is part of the OS on Android, for those of you not in the Apple camp. It's in settings.

[jrittenhouse]

I take it that you use Android, John?

[peteralway]

Congratulations on your daughter reaching that notable milestone of maturity--providing tech support for Dad!

[jrittenhouse]

**chuckle** Considering I've been the house tech around here for 30 years, it's a change. She has a lot of constant pounding use of her iPhone (and her iPad before she mislaid it) and talking to other geeky kids with stuff, so...she's better with iStuff than I am. My ego will deal. **smile**