What Happens When You Force Stop An App on Your Phone

Have you ever wondered what DIY your smartphone would be like? You might be wondering if this will improve the performance of your device. What if it ends up breaking and slowing things down? Instead of just saying “Do it or don’t do it” to users, we like to explain in detail what is really going on – the effect, impact, and invisible background action. We are therefore going to expand on what happens when you force stop an application on your Android or iPhone.

Force quitting an app on iOS devices is pretty straightforward; Drag the app up in the iOS app switcher. For Android devices, you need to launch the app info page (Settings> Apps & notifications> App info> select App) and tap Force stop option. You can also use the task switch function of your Android phone.

You know how to force stop an app, but what exactly does it mean to force stop an app? And what happens next? Does this have a negative effect on the performance of the application? Does it affect your smartphone? Is it safe to force stop an application? And when exactly should you do it? We answer all of these questions and more in the sections below.

What does it mean to force stop an application

Most people think that all apps are terminated entirely when you regularly close them on your phone i.e. by removing them from the app switcher. But it’s not always the case. For example, an application running some unfinished process (for example, a pending / in progress download) may remain active in the background for a few minutes or seconds after it is closed. The application will eventually be closed, but not until it completes current processes and prepares for shutdown.

On the other hand, some apps (like music player, health monitoring apps, instant messengers, etc.) may continue to actively run in the background – constantly updating their content and sending notifications – even after they close. No matter how many times you complete them, they stay in the background.

Forcing an app to stop will completely (and immediately) end all foreground and background processes related to that particular app.

Is it safe to force stop an application

Well, it depends on why or when you are forcing the app to quit. But for the most part, it’s quite safe to force quit an app. More details below.

Ideally, it is recommended that you force an application to stop only if it is malfunctioning, if the application keeps crashing, or if some of its features are not working. Force shutting down a roaming app has a good chance of resolving issues that cause it to malfunction.

Conversely, it is somewhat dangerous to force stop an application, whether it is working correctly or not. This is because you risk losing unsaved data. We develop this in the next section

Do you lose app data when you force stop an app

Force quitting an app will not delete any data that has been saved on your device. However, unsaved data can be deleted – it depends on the running processes (foreground and background) in the app. Suppose you are writing in a note-taking app that doesn’t automatically save your texts, forcing the app to close will delete the unsaved text you composed.

Likewise, if an app is downloading data to a web server or downloading data to your device in the background, forcing the app to stop will stop the process and could lead to data corruption.

Does Force Stop free up space

When you force quit an application, previously saved application data or cache data is not affected. Therefore, forcing an application to stop has no storage saving effect. Only the memory (RAM) occupied / used by the application will be unloaded and made available for other applications. Hence, it might increase the speed and performance of your phone.

If you’re looking to free up space on your Android or iOS device, forcing apps to stop isn’t the right course of action. Refer to the articles linked below for helpful tips on saving storage.

Does this affect app performance

There are several ways that forcefully stopping an application can affect its performance and other applications. As mentioned earlier, forcing a roaming app to shut down can help restore its performance to normal. The app can run better and even faster when you relaunch it, and rarely slower.

Likewise, when you force shutdown an app (especially CPU and RAM hungry apps) and keep it closed, other apps may perform better and faster. This is because the forced shutdown of the application frees more memory than other applications can use.

Force Stop Save Battery

Depending on the state of the application, forcing it to stop may or may not produce a battery saving effect. For example, if an app is idle or suspended / minimized in the background and is not using any CPU power, it consumes virtually no battery. Therefore, force quitting the app may not save your device’s battery.

To check the amount of battery consumed by an app, follow the steps below.

For ios

Go to Settings> Battery. At the bottom of the page, you should see a list of apps and their respective battery usage (in%) over the past 24 hours.

For android

Step 1: Go to Settings and select Battery.

2nd step: Tap the three-dot icon in the upper right corner of the Battery menu page and select Battery Usage.

You should see the app consuming your device’s battery as well as the portion (in%) that it has used since the last time you charged your phone.

Force stopping an app that is consuming battery power will only save power if the app is left closed. The app will resume battery consumption as soon as you restart it. Again, unless an app is using a lot of your device’s power (especially in the background), forcing it to shut down won’t save battery power.

How to cancel a forced shutdown

Once an application has been forcibly terminated, the action cannot be undone. The app remains closed until you manually relaunch it. And that’s basically the only way to undo a forced shutdown: reopen the app.

Force stop demystified

At this point, we hope you’ve learned a thing or two about force quitting apps on your smartphone. As we have established above, it is recommended to force stop an application only in case of malfunction. If you need to save battery power (especially on Android), closing an app in the usual way would be enough. Force quitting apps gives little or almost no battery saving results. Leave a comment below if you have any related questions that we haven’t covered in this article.