Closing applications effectively on your iOS device

This is another new stuff I learned today. Ever since the introduction of multi-tasking on the iOS device, applications are not automatically closed when you stop using it and switch over to another application. When you just close an application, it still runs in the background and uses power on your iOS device. This in turn consumes some battery power which makes your iOS device drain faster than usual. I never really read some articles about this and I thought that by just closing the application it will just stop on itself but it's wrong. Here's a typical memory consumption on your iOS device when some applications are running in the background.

Memory consumption on my iPhone 4S

Notice that there are a lot of wired memory than usual compared to the free memory, take also into account the number of active memory being consumed by the background applications. I'll cover their definitions on a next blog post I'll be writing. I'm also using System Activity on my iPhone and iPod Touch to check on these. System Activity is a $0.99 application available on the iTunes App Store -- you can check out the application here. Now going back, I thought of holding the applications in the multi-task bar. I was surprised that they started to jiggle with a red circle on the top left corner of the application with a dashed line inside -- more like a stop sign indicating that the application can be "killed" by tapping on it.

Some applications running in the multi-task bar

The stop symbol for "killing" the applications

Lo and behold, my free memory was increased after killing some of the applications in my multi-task bar. This is also good when you want to conserve some battery life for your iOS device especially now since the latest iOS -- iOS 5.0 -- is still being plagued by battery problems. Some users who have updated to 5.0.1 still experience some problems and this simple step can help at least in conserving power. This is a very neat implementation but the user cannot discover this right away. It's not explicitly written anywhere and you must research on it a bit or accidentally discover like what happened to me -- Eureka!

Increased free memory after killing applications running in the background

----------------------------------
Check out the System Activity application on the iTunes App Store to monitor your memory consumption.
Check out also my blog on saving battery life for your iPhone 4S.