How to Close iPhone Apps Running in Background

Whenever you open an app on the iPhone, you can hide it by pressing the Home button … but that doesn’t actually close the app. It continues to run in the background, even after you restart the phone. So eventually, you will have almost every app on your phone running in the background which can drain your battery, slow down your device, and potentially increase your data usage.

Here are instructions for how to explicitly close all of the apps running in the background on your phone. Don’t worry; this shouldn’t cause you to lose any information. We recommend you do this once a week.

1. Double tap the Home button to bring up the multitasking bar at the bottom of the screen. This area will show all of the apps that are running in the background on your phone.
   
   
2. Press and hold anywhere on the multitasking bar until the icons on it start to wiggle. While they are wiggling, each icon has a symbol above it.
   
3. Press the symbol on each app to close it down. Repeat this until the multitasking bar is empty.