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While reading the iOS 14 guide by Apple here, on page 78, In the Quit and reopen an app section

The highlighted text

What does the highlighted statement mean?

  • Is it that on iOS, the apps don’t close(terminate processes is what I mean here) at all and are still active and the app switcher is just for the ease of multitasking.
  • Is it that the services(eg. in the mail app, the service to fetch mails and send notifications) are still on, but the app is terminated.
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It is actually neither of the two. It is a third variant, namely that ordinary apps cannot run in the background. So when you're looking at some app, other apps in the background aren't consuming CPU time (which translates into battery power) - so quitting the app won't make it consume less.

In regarding to receiving notifications, which you mentioned, they will be received no matter if the app is quit or not. In some cases more battery power will actually be used here if you quit the app instead of leaving it be.

In general you should not be quitting apps unless you're experiencing some kind of bug or problem with the app where it doesn't work.

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    I feel we should also point out that quitting out of an app that's in the background can actually increase battery use overall, as the next time you launch it it is guaranteed to have to read the the app out of storage completely, rather than possibly being cached in memory still.
    – Logarr
    Commented Sep 17, 2020 at 21:17
  • Yes, I wrote just that in my answer: "In some cases more battery power will actually be used here if you quit the app instead of leaving it be."
    – jksoegaard
    Commented Sep 17, 2020 at 21:55
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iOS has pretty tight controls on when an app can run. Mostly this means that if the app is not in the foreground, it cannot run, though there are exceptions. When you swipe away from an app, the app's state is saved in memory, so the next time you open it it's faster and more efficient to start up. The increase in memory usage this causes isn't a problem either -- if the system starts to run low on memory, one of the first ways it will increase memory is by evicting backgrounded apps.

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