Up until now we’ve seen several tips on how to fix iOS 7’s battery life problem, and while many of those tips worked, there’s always something there that you can add or remove. It has been common knowledge that you should quit running apps on iOS to help preserve battery life. Well, it now turns out that this was a misconception (sort of) and you shouldn’t always quit running apps on iOS 7.

Scotty Loveless, a former Genius Bar technician, says that you shouldn’t quit apps on iOS, and he explains this in a very simple and convincing way:

What most people tell you is that closing your apps will save your battery life because it keeps the apps from running in the background.

Wrong.

Yes, it does shut down the app, but what you don’t know is that you are actually making your battery life worse if you do this on a regular basis. Let me tell you why.

By closing the app, you take the app out of the phone’s RAM. While you think this may be what you want to do, it’s not. When you open that same app again the next time you need it, your device has to load it back into memory all over again. All of that loading and unloading puts more stress on your device than just leaving it alone. Plus, iOS closes apps automatically as it needs more memory, so you’re doing something your device is already doing for you. You are meant to be the user of your device, not the janitor.

So as we can understand from this, closing apps might temporarily be good, but in the long run when you have to launch that same app again, your device will need to load that app again in RAM, which puts more stress on your device. So it’s better to leave the app running instead of manually closing them every time.

Those apps that you think are running in the multitasking area are not actually running in the background. iOS freezes apps where you last left using them, unless if you’ve enabled background app refresh, and apart from that, no apps are allowed to run in the background unless they are using location services, playing music, recording audio or checking for incoming calls.

You should disable background app refresh for apps that you don’t care about, which is yet another way to improve battery life on your iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices.