If you’ve updated to iOS 8 and you’re experiencing low battery life or wasting your monthly data share, it may be because iOS 8 automatically refreshes background apps even if they’re not being actively used.
At first, you might think that when you exit an app to return to the home screen, that app will pause itself completely until you return to it. However, it does actually refresh the data while running in the background so you don’t have to manually refresh it when you come back.
This is known as the “intelligent” multitasking feature in iOS 8 that allows apps to remain partially active while in the app switcher, but for some users it may just be a battery draining feature. Fortunately, when you exit an app, you can close it, really pausing everything until you open it again later.
Plus, Background App Refresh can suck up your data allowance instantly. If you are constantly on the go and have a lot of apps running in the background, these apps are constantly refreshed for new information and use data to do so. It’s just a waste of your data for apps to do this, so it’s a good idea to disable the feature.
Disable Background App Refresh
Background App Refresh is a feature that is enabled by default, so you have to play around with some settings to turn it off. Fortunately, it’s really easy to manage.
Open the app and go to . This will open a window with a list of installed apps with toggle switches next to them.
At the top, you’ll want to tap the toggle switch next to it to turn off the entire feature if it isn’t already. From there the toggle switch will change from green to white/gray.
You should be good to go from there and hopefully you’ll experience better battery life and also save on your monthly data allowance.
However, it’s important to note that apps that use GPS can no longer use GPS while running in the background. This means that if your phone has navigation but you want to switch to another app while the navigation is running, it will stop using the GPS while the navigation is running in the background, so you may have some problems when you come back.
That’s why it’s a good idea to keep Background App Refresh enabled for navigation apps and other apps that use GPS. This is where customizing Background App Refresh comes in handy.
Customizing Background App Refresh
Under the home button on the “Background App Refresh” page there will be a list of your installed apps with toggle switches next to each one.
These are the apps that can use the background refresh feature. By default, most toggle switches will be green; that means background app refresh is turned on for these apps.
You can switch between individual apps and only have certain apps that use background refresh; this is a great way to better control what apps can and cannot do when you are not actively using them.
Personally, I enable background refresh for maps and weather apps, but not Evernote, Stocks, YouTube etc. I disable it for apps that don’t really need to be refreshed in the background, like However, which apps you use is ultimately up to you. they don’t want it to refresh automatically when running in the background.