iPhone users given urgent warning not to swipe apps closed as it's ruining your phone

If you're an iPhone user - particularly if you've had one since the earliest generations - you'll likely be used to swiping up to close apps you're not using.

After all, it's commonly thought that apps slow down your phone and drain battery, so you're just helping your device... right?

Well, that might not actually be the case.

Anita Kot / Getty

For the longest time, iPhones had difficulty with multitasking - if you left every app you used open at the same time, your phone would slow down massively - but the technology has hugely progressed.

In fact, Apple actually advises against religiously swiping up to close all your apps.

The tech giant says: "You should close an app only if it’s unresponsive" - but otherwise, you should just let them be.

This flies in the face of old wives' tales, but it's a result of years of progress where multitasking is concerned, and is very much tied to the ever-increasing power of the chips that lie at an iPhone's heart.

Since Apple started making its own chips, the speed and efficiency of the iPhone has basically hit turbo mode, and the phone is now able to effectively freeze background apps.

This means they're locked in a state, but aren't active and therefore don't take up almost any processing bandwidth at all.

So, you're losing nothing by having them sat in the background, and gain the bonus that they'll probably start up quicker next time you open them.

Matt Cardy / Contributor / Getty

Apps do sometimes freeze or become unresponsive, even in these modern days, so simply killing the app and restarting it becomes the only option open to you - but that's not often.

Of course, sometimes apps will refresh and restart anyway if a process times out or you haven't used them in weeks, so it's not like they're all waiting for you the whole time.

Still, the reality is that this effective unfreezing is far more efficient and less intensive on the phone's chip than the equivalent start-up on an app that is going from a blank slate.

So, there might be some re-learning required if you're someone who has become used to swiping all those apps closed. Better by far, it would seem, to let them sit in the background, than to waste your time and energy getting rid of them.