How to Switch and Quit Apps on the iPhone

From the day the app concept was invented, the iPhone desperately needed a handy way to switch among open apps. Maybe you want to copy something from Safari (on the web) into Mail (a message you’re writing). Maybe you want to refer to your frequent flyer number (in Notes) as you’re using an airline’s check-in app. Maybe you want to adjust something in Settings and then get back to whatever you were doing.

The key to switching apps is this: Double-press the Home button.

In iOS 7, what happens next has had some radical cosmetic surgery. Whatever is on the screen gets replaced by the new, improved app switcher.

You still see a horizontally scrolling row of icons, representing the open apps. But above them, you now see shrunken-down images of their screens. You can actually see what’s going on in each open app. In fact, sometimes, that’s all you need; you can refer to another app’s screen in this view, without actually having to switch into that app.

When you scroll horizontally to look through your recently opened apps (they appear in chronological order), you may notice that the icons and their screens seem to scroll at different speeds. It’s a little odd at first, but you get the point: They’re actually moving so that the icon is always centered under its much larger screen.

When you tap an app’s icon or screen in the app switcher, you open that app.

The task switcher also lets you manually exit an app, closing it down. To do that, flick the unwanted app’s mini-screen upward, so that it flies up off the top of the screen.

(The app will return to the lineup the next time you open it from the Home screen; it’s not really gone.)

Now, you’ll need this gesture only rarely. It’s not as though you’re supposed to quit every app when you’re finished using it, as you might on a PC. The iPhone is perfectly capable of managing its own memory situation. You may see dozens of apps in the app switcher, but you’ll never sense that your phone is bogging down as a result.

Instead, the force-quitting gesture is intended for use when an app is acting glitchy and simply needs to be restarted.

Excerpted with permission from David Pogue’s “iPhone: The Missing Manual,” Seventh Edition from O’Reilly Media.