How do you close all apps on an iphone

How do you close all apps on an iphone
Closing an app is useful when you encounter strange behaviour or bugs and want to start fresh with an app. It might come handy if you want to tidy up app switcher as well. Although there is no gesture to close all apps at once, you can still close several apps at the same time with this little trick.

How to close all apps at once on iPhone

There is no official function to close all apps at once. But on iPhones with a Home button (iPhone 8 and older) you can use a trick to put all apps into an inactive state at the same time. This way you can prevent apps from working in the background and loading the main memory.

  1. Press and hold the Home button until the “slide to power off” slider appears.
  2. Now press and hold the Home button until you return to the Home screen.

This trick does not make the apps disappear from the app switcher. But if you try to open them, they will start to reload. This shows that they are no longer active and do not use memory.

Keep in mind: Once backgrounded, an app is actually completely off, unless there is a problem. Even if you see it in the app switcher, it is usually just a benign screenshot that doesn’t take up any system resources. The widespread assumption that closing all apps on iPhone results in better battery life is therefore untrue. Nevertheless, there are apps that continue to work in the background and collect data – such as navigation apps. In such cases the trick is quite useful.

How to close three apps at once

If you love to have a tidy app switcher, you can close several apps simultaneously with a simple gesture.

  1. Go to the app switcher by pressing the Home button twice in a row (iPhone 8 and older) or swiping to the middle of the screen and holding your finger briefly on the display (iPhone X and newer).
  2. Swipe to the left or right and navigate between the apps in the background. You can now close the apps by dragging them upwards.
  3. You can close up to three apps at the same time by touching each of the three preview windows with one finger and dragging them upwards at the same time.

How do you close all apps on an iphone

You may repeat this procedure as often as you like, effectively closing all of your apps in the shortest amount of time that is possible.

Tip: In another article we show you what else you can do, if an app freezes!

Even iOS apps occasionally misbehave — they can crash, or freeze, or otherwise stop working. If you’re new to iOS or just haven’t had this happen before, you may not know how to actually quit an app (as opposed to just swiping it off your screen). Here’s how to quit an app and, if you need to, shut down your phone. (We used a phone loaded with a beta of iOS 16, but this will work with earlier versions of the OS just as well.)

Quit an app

  • Open the App Switcher by either swiping up from the bottom of the screen and then pausing in the middle or (if you have a Home button) double pressing the Home button.
  • You’ll see an overlapping view of all your open apps. Swipe to the right or left until you find the app you want to quit.
  • Swipe up on the app to close it.

Open the App Switcher and swipe sideways to find the app.

When you’ve found the misbehaving app, swipe it up to quit.

While there isn’t any way to close all of your apps at once, you can swipe off up to three apps at a time by using the appropriate number of fingers. Otherwise, if you’ve got a lot of apps running, you’ll have to simply swipe them off one at a time.

Shut down your phone

If, for any reason, swiping the app off doesn’t solve the problem, then shut down your phone by pressing and holding the side button and either volume button until you see sliders appear. Drag the one that says slide to power off to the right. (If you have an iPhone with a Home button, instead, press and hold the side or the Sleep / Wake button.)

You should then be able to restart it by using the power button.

If worse comes to worst and you can’t shut down your phone this way, you can force restart it. If you have an iPhone 8 or later:

  • Quickly press and release the volume up button.
  • Quickly press and release the volume down button.
  • Press and hold the side power button. After a while, the screen should go black; keep holding the button until you see the Apple logo, which will indicate that the phone has restarted. You can then release the button.

Update September 1st, 2022, 10:11AM ET: This article was originally published on June 4th, 2021, and has been updated to add information on force restarting an iPhone.

How do I close all running apps at once?

Close all apps: Swipe up from the bottom, hold, then let go. Swipe from left to right. On the left, tap Clear all.

How do I close all tabs on iPhone 11?

To close all Safari tabs on your iPhone, open the Safari app and then tap and hold the Tabs switcher icon. This is the icon with the two overlapping squares in the bottom-right corner of your screen. Finally, tap Close All XX Tabs to confirm.