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They don’t realize that they should shut them down to improve their iPhone 5s performance & battery life.

1. Shut Down iPhone Weekly
2. Turn Off Apps Daily

Your apps are rock solid in my tests. I deal with *a lot* of other apps that aren't, most of which I never mention here.

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What can sometimes happen is that an app triggers some bug in some part of the OS. Then the OS starts wobbling, and it doesn't matter how many apps you quit, a reboot is needed.

I've also hit an issue recently that might affect some camera apps. Under certain conditions, each time you take a photo the OS itself leaks a big chunk of memory. The app might only use 10MB, but the OS component can use >100MB after just a few shots. Quitting the app should free the memory, but I can imagine there being some scenario where it never gets freed – and then it'll have an impact until you reboot. The app itself doesn't leak, so it's hard for devs to even notice an issue like this, and sometimes the OS kills the app to free memory while it's running, so it looks like the app crashed. Not good! (But fixed in my own apps, don't worry )

Thank you for your detailed response from the perspective of a developer. One question….

When an iOS app crashes, how does this effect what's in RAM? On a desktop when an app crashes, sometimes not all processes quit or close properly, which can cause instability throughout the system until you quit out of all open apps and reboot. How does iOS handle misbehaving and unstable apps?

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Thank you for stopping by. Please clarify your response.

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The rebooting advice is excellent. I reboot my devices semi-regularly – basically, whenever something doesn't feel right, or something doesn't work properly, or the battery seems to run down faster than normal. You don't need to do it daily (although there's no harm), but if something isn't running as well as it used to a reboot will probably fix it.

Then there's the memory thing. Memory handling (and multitasking) on iOS are widely misunderstood – and apps like the one in that screenshot do more harm than good!

Those apps in the task-switcher bar? Most of them are *not* open at all. Likely none of them are running (however slowly), so they're no slowing anything down or using power. And they're not stopping other apps from using any memory. Here's how it actually works:

First, that task-switching bar. It's just a list of recently used apps, nothing else. Some of them might be open, but most of them won't be. "Closing an app" from this bar will close it if it's open, if not it's just removing the icon from the list.

Second, multi-tasking. Apps don't continue running in the background like they do on a computer. When you close them or open another app, they just pause and wait to be reactivated. They don't use any power at all – just the memory they need.

There are a couple of exceptions. GPS navigation apps have to stay open to give you directions, music players have to keep playing music, and chat / phone apps have to stay connected if you're in a conversation. These are the only apps you need to quit manually – and even there, they'll usually handle that automatically (e.g. a music player will 'pause' if it's not playing music).

Memory: that "full" memory bar looks bad doesn't it? It means your next app won't have enough memory to open. Wrong. When you open your next app, if it needs more memory than is 'free', iOS will automatically close an app you haven't used for a long time, freeing some memory. So that 'full' bar actually means nothing, you don't need to close any apps.

What happens if you don't close apps manually all the time? Nothing. If you go to use an app that's still open in the background, it fires up instantly with whatever you were doing before there on screen. If you open a new app, either it'll load straight up, or worst case it'll load very slightly slower because another app had to shut down.

If you do close apps manually all the time: Every app you open has to load from scratch. This takes time. Then it has to figure out what you were doing before, and try to get that back to how it was – which takes more time. And it's burning the battery while it does all this unnecessary stuff.

So there you go: don't close apps manually, or you'll waste your time AND lower your battery life!

From my experience with cranky FREE apps like WordPress and Foodspotting, the best thing to do is delete the app. Shut down the phone completely. Turn it back on and download the app again from the app store.