How-To Close Apps on an iPhone/iPad

Smart AND cute! My, they sure do grow up fast! :)

Very cute, but not necessarily correct.

http://ryantrotz.com/2012/05/ios-multitasking-stop-force-quitting-applications/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ios-multitasking-stop-force-quitting-applications

^^^HEY! He does it HIS way!

Cute (but wrong): http://speirs.org/blog/2012/1/2/misconceptions-about-ios-multitasking.html

Well, the spears.org article is mostly right. However, I would assume the iPhone practices aggressive power management, which typically includes shutting down DRAM banks that aren't currently needed. So you can potentially save power if you flush enough apps from memory, but that's not quite the same thing as closing them from the task bar (which may include applications that were already flushed from memory).

And it certainly has little to do with them "running" in the background. That was Apple's complaint about giving apps free reign to do whatever they wanted, and why they implemented a rather restrictive model that leads to funny behavior occasionally.

The most important side effect closing apps in the task bar can have is speeding up load times for other applications you may open/reopen later, since you can avoid the flushing phase if there's already free memory available. That's the only reason I tend to manage my task bar; because I want better responsiveness on other apps after I close a memory hog.