How to Close Apps on the Samsung Galaxy S4

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is a powerful flagship Android smartphone. One that is capable of multi-tasking with the best of them, or running any app or game available on the Google Play Store. However, there’s times when closing all of those running apps could be useful.

This may seem like a simple task for most smartphone users, especially if you’ve used Android before, but with the Galaxy S4 selling millions of units and stealing old Blackberry or iOS users, this question comes up more times than you’d think. For all those average smartphone users wondering how to close and clear running apps on the Galaxy S4, we have the details below.

While the general Android rule of thumb is to let the operating system manage your memory, not to mention Samsung’s Galaxy S4 comes with 2GB of RAM, there’s still times a user may want to clear no longer used but open apps from the memory. Google’s Android OS does an excellent job managing apps and multi-tasking, putting apps in a low-power state ready to be called into action with ease, and more. That said, many users still opt to close apps manually.

Whether this is to free up RAM, kill a process like Google Maps that could be draining that all-important battery life, or other reasons, here’s the simple steps. You’ll simply need to tap a few buttons and you’ll be done in no time. It’s so simple many people know how already, but if you don’t here’s how.

Instructions

The Samsung Galaxy S4 (and most Samsung devices) have a dedicated rectangle home button on the bottom front of the device, and you’ll want to long press that home key. From here you’ll see the multi-tasking menu, which is great for going from YouTube to Gmail and back with ease, but this is also where you kill and close running apps.

This screen actually varies from carrier to carrier in the US, slightly, for some odd reason, but the steps remain the same. After long-pressing home you’ll see icons or Task Manager, Google (Now), and Close all apps at the bottom of the display. The left “X” symbol is close all, and you can simply tap this to close all currently running apps.

It’s that easy, and a simple tap will close all the apps that are currently open on your Samsung Galaxy S4 or other Galaxy devices. However, many users may not want to close all apps, but just something like Google Maps, navigation, Netflix, or something else that could be draining the battery.

Read: How to Cut, Copy & Paste on Android

Closing just one app is even easier. Once a user long-presses home you’ll see the icons detailed above, as well as tons of tiles giving you a live preview of each open application. You can scroll through this list if there’s more than a few, and simply swipe away each individual app and running program. A swipe of the finger and the app closes.

Now the rule of thumb part mentioned above is because Android handles memory and running apps beautifully, and sometimes killing all these processes can actually lower battery life. Simply because the phone will restart some of these apps, or if you close the camera only to open it 20 minutes later, you’ve wasted processes and battery life. So as a rule of thumb it’s only necessary to close big or processor-intensive apps, or maybe clear all before heading to bed for the night.

Users claim all types of different results for clearing apps through the app and task manager, but use it wisely and feel free to try it yourself today.