After just a few hours, your iPhone’s app switcher can become cluttered and even so chaotic that you don’t even want to use it. If you like to keep your app switcher clean and tidy, with only your current session’s apps available, there’s a trick to force close all apps at the same time instead of one at a time.
Before you go any further, know that closing apps on your iPhone won’t improve battery life or speed up iOS.
Apple recommends that you “only close an app if it’s not responding”because iOS automatically optimizes background apps on your iPhone to free up resources for the apps you’re currently using. Force quitting apps will make those apps open slower and may hurt battery life as those apps will need to download all their assets again the next time they start.
If you prefer a clean app switcher over a slight loss of battery life and slower app launch times, there’s nothing wrong with force quitting all running, updating, and suspended background apps. While Apple doesn’t provide an easy way to close all apps in the app switcher, that doesn’t stop you from closing multiple apps at the same time.
How to Force Quit Multiple iPhone Apps
You probably already know how to close one app in the app switcher: swipe up on its card until it disappears. Well, you can use the same concept to exit two, three, or even four apps at the same time. Just swipe across as many app cards at the same time as you can, using each finger, and you’ll quickly scroll through your list. This trick works whether you’re in portrait or landscape.
Make it easier with custom gesture
Using multiple fingers at the same time to force close more than one app at a time can be quick, but can also be annoying if you have hundreds of apps in the app switcher. To make the process easier and faster, you can automate the entire process with a custom AssistiveTouch gesture. On your iPhone go to:
- iOS 13-15: Settings -> Accessibility -> Touch -> AssistiveTouch -> Create new gesture
- iOS 12 and below: Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> AssistiveTouch -> Create New Gesture.
Then recreate the swipe you would use to exit multiple apps, select Save, and name the gesture. Click “Save”when you’re done, then enable AssistiveTouch, which can be done in a number of ways:
- Turn it on in the AssistiveTouch settings.
- Ask Siri to “turn on AssistiveTouch.”
- Triple-click the side button or home button if you have accessibility shortcuts enabled.
You will see an AssistiveTouch button overlaid on the screen. Open the app switcher, tap the AssistiveTouch button, select Custom, and tap a custom gesture. Then touch and drag the icons into place, then release. If you align everything correctly, the application card group will disappear from the screen. To repeat an action, tap the gesture dots on the screen to swipe the next batch and keep doing this until the app switcher is empty.
Speed ​​up custom gesture access
You can access the AssistiveTouch custom gesture faster by customizing the top-level menu. Select “Customize Top Level Menu”in the AssistiveTouch settings, then add a new control to the menu or replace one of the shortcuts with your own gesture. This way, you will be able to launch the gesture immediately after opening the AssistiveTouch menu.
However, it’s not as fast as it could be. To activate it even faster, assign a custom automation to open when you double-tap or long-press the on-screen AssistiveTouch button. Unfortunately, you cannot set any custom actions for a single click shortcut.
While the custom gesture isn’t as quick as the dedicated Clear All button in the app switcher, don’t expect Apple to enable this feature anytime soon. If you don’t want to jailbreak your iPhone, a custom gesture is the best option available to avoid swiping and swiping card after card.