Apple just admitted your favourite battery-saving trick doesn’t even work

We’re going to be straight up here: the battery life on an iPhone is absolutely atrocious. Not only does it seem to drain faster than a sieve but it lies directly to your face about it on a regular basis.

“37% battery life? No fear, I’ll just make a quick call and stick it on flight mode… wait, what? 1% but I didn’t even press anything… *black screen*… you son of a…”

It’s a scenario that we’re all familiar with. Luckily there are a few decent hacks that will keep the juice on your phone pumping for a little while longer: things like keeping it on the aforementioned flight mode, or, killing all of your background apps.

• Related: 8 Smartphone battery myths busted

Well, we have news for you, the latter is a lie. A filthy citric-tinged Apple lie. Closing your background apps, the holy grail ‘have you tried restarting it’ fix for all iPhone woes is actually a load of bollocks. A myth.

We know this because iOS chief Craig Federighi (a man who definitely should have told us this earlier) decided to recently dispel the myth. Replying to an email from an Apple customer to CEO Tim Cook, he was asked: “do you quit your iOS multitasking apps frequently and is this necessary for battery life?”

His response?

“No and no.”

Just that. Not a sorry, we’ve been bullshitting you, just no. Everything you know is a lie, stop wasting precious seconds of battery time by closing stuff.

According to Apple:

“After you switch to a different app, some apps run for a short period of time before they’re set to a suspended state. Apps that are in a suspended state aren’t actively in use, pen, or taking up system resources.”

So there you have it. The greatest lie of the 21st century, laid bare.

[Via: 9to5mac]