Ever since Apple introduced multi-tasking on their iOS devices, there has been an enormous amount of confusion among users of these devices as to how it actually works. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard people say that they are going through their apps and closing them to save battery, speed the phone up, etc. I’ve even heard Apple employees tell this to customers who come in saying they don’t get the battery life they want out of their iOS device. Well I have come across two articles that explain everything you need to know about iOS multi-tasking and the force quit fallacy. Once you read through these articles, you will be extremely well versed in iOS multi-tasking. Enjoy!

The Force Quit Fallacy – Read article on MartianCraft.com
Misconceptions About iOS Multitasking via Speirs.org

There is one iOS “tip” that I keep hearing and it is wrong. Worse, I keep hearing it from supposedly authoritative sources. I have even heard it from the lips of Apple “Geniuses” in stores. Here is the advice – and remember it is wrong:


Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. There are caveats to this but anyone dispensing the advice above is clearly uninformed enough that they will certainly not be aware of these subtleties. Let me be as clear as I can be:



Let’s get technical: iOS apps have five states of execution. These are:



When you press the home button, the app moves from Active to Background. Most apps usually then go from Background to Suspended in a matter of seconds. The first technical caveat is that Suspended apps remain in the device’s memory. This is so they can resume more quickly when you go back to them. They’re not using processor time and they’re not sucking battery power.



Background Tasks

When an app is sent to the Background, it usually moves to the Suspended state in a few seconds. An app can request an extension to this by declaring that it’s starting a “background task”.

A good example is an app that downloads largish files from the web such as Instacast, my favourite podcast app. When Instacast is Active, it can start to download new podcasts. If I then hit the home button on my iPhone, Instacast gets five seconds to run in the Background state and then it’s Suspended. That interrupts the download of my podcasts, which might take 5 minutes or more.

iOS allows Instacast to declare that a download is a “background task”. This allows Instacast an extra period of background running after I hit the home button to complete the podcast download. While apps can request additional Background time, that time is not infinitely long. The app gets about 10 minutes of Background running time and then it is forcibly suspended by iOS. Again, you don’t have to worry about this yourself.

Indefinite Background Running

All apps get 5 seconds of Background running. Some apps can request a 10-minute extension. There are a small number of apps that genuinely need to run indefinitely in the background and iOS allows this. There are exactly five kinds of apps allowed to run indefinitely in the Background state in iOS 5:

  • Newsstand apps that are downloading new content.

All well-written apps in the above categories should become Suspended when they are no longer performing the task in hand. When Instacast finishes playing a podcast, it should be Suspended. There are some built-in apps that also run continuously in the background on iOS – the most-used one is probably Mail.


I said earlier that “the user never has to manage Background tasks on iOS”. The only exception to this is when one of these Background-running apps goes berserk and will not terminate properly. That, however, is an exceptional situation and not a normal part of being an iOS user.


Let me wrap this up by giving you a quick summary:



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