"Close" or "exit" Ipod Touch apps?

[steelrider]

Originally Posted by nick98338

I have a touch 4G. To "close" an app. I press the home button twice. The screen shows a row of icons at the bottom of the screen. I find the icon for the app I want to close, and press the icon for a full second. The icon (and all the others) change to an icon with a red minus sign, and all of the icons start to wiggle. I press the minus sign, on the icon of the app I want to close. The icon disappears. The app is no longer running.

Works for me, Thanks. My ipod was running down really fast.

[j238]

It's really too bad there isn't a one-touch method to fully close an app. Plenty of Windows users don't know what's going on in their system tray and I'm sure there are iPhone and iPod Touch users who don't know what a background process is.

I'd like to listen to Pandora or WFMU while I use another app, but I certainly don't want every app I use to remain open while I use my iPod Touch.

Speaking of WFMU, a friend recently disrupted a film screening due to the background app. If it was fully closed by default, that would never have happened.

[kornchild2002]

The thing is that most apps aren't really running in the background. Some can perform small background updates (such as Mail or Facebook) but they don't consume large amounts of resources. Essentially most apps go into a paused state until they are re-opened. This isn't true multi-tasking like it is on Windows or Mac OS X, this is Apple's cutdown version. They cut it down so that large amounts of resources would not be consumed by background apps.

Ever since upgrading to iOS 4.1, I have never fully closed an app on either my 4G iPod touch or iPad 2. I had previously encountered bugs where Mail was constantly updating itself over wi-fi on my 4G iPod touch when it was in sleep mode but Apple stopped that with iOS 4.1. Either way, there really is no need to fully close an app on iOS since it isn't required especially under iOS 5 where all notifications are now giving at the top and won't interfere with anything else.

[KaitWink]

The thing I'm having issues with is that it won't let me tap the minus Sign and therefore I can't turn off apps.

[kornchild2002]

You are either not correctly pressing the minus sign or there is actually something wrong with iOS and you need to restore your iPod.

[Gadzooks]

When I first got my iPod touch in feb this year I had a problem and I contacted Apple and the first thing they had me do was to double click the home button and close all open apps. ( hold down any icon until they jiggle then start tapping the red minus sign). Remember to flick to the side to close all of them. They recommended doing this every few days. I guess do it every day if you use lots of apps.