Hi John,
I followed the intriguing headline to your article, and was pleased to learn that the "one simple setting" to improve battery life was something I was already doing on my iPhone. But a few minutes later I followed another intriguing headline - "4 Apps That Are Quietly Destroying Your Cellphone" - to an article by Roger Fingas, written one day before your article.
He opens by stating that the notion that background apps can consume too much memory and processor power in smartphones - as they can on a Mac or PC - is a "persistent misconception", and goes on to explain:
"While it's true that some phone apps are more demanding than others, Apple and Google are well aware of this, and have designed iOS and Android to manage background apps automatically. There's no need to close all the unused items in your app switcher -- they're being paused or closed as needed. In fact you could actually make things worse by doing this, forcing paused apps to reload from scratch, and interrupting essential tasks like fetching email."
He then goes on to explain that the real offenders are four specific app categories - Tik-Tok (and other social media), mapping apps, 3-D action games, and video calling (eg Zoom, Face Time, and video calling) which cause serious battery drain and bandwidth consumption on cell phones because they are constantly fetching data and processing complicated images.
So if Apple already has the background app refresh issue covered I am wondering whether I should restore background app refresh to the apps I turned off!
Yours truly,
Confused Magpie
