Why You Should Not Refresh Smartphone Apps in the Background

It’s a trade-off: longer battery life versus keeping everything fresh

Edward C. Baig,

AARP

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Published March 17, 2026

an illustration of a person mopping a smartphone screen

Paul Spella (Getty Images, 2)

AARP members and readers are invited to submit pressing technology questions they’d like me to tackle in my Tech Guru column, including issues around devices, security, social media and how all the puzzle pieces fit together. This week’s reader question is about one way to save juice on your phone by turning off a feature that can drain its battery. 

I checked my iPhone settings. All of my apps are set for background app refresh. Is this really necessary? — Alice

No, Alice, this isn’t really necessary, though you might want to leave this setting on for some apps, if only to keep their content up-to-date. But by no means should you feel compelled to let every app on your smartphone refresh itself in the background, certainly not any you are not actively using.

“Background App Refresh,” as it is called on an iPhone, explains what it is: Even after you quit an app and place it in a suspended state, it can check for updates so that the information you may want to engage with is as current as possible when you return. This happens when your device is connected to cellular or Wi-Fi.

In a vacuum, you might ask yourself, “Why not do this?” But the “why not” in keeping those apps refreshed behind the scenes is the negative impact it could have on the phone’s battery life, a precious resource all of us depend on.

You have an iPhone, Alice, so I’ll start there, but Android users can also disable similar background activity on their devices.

Turning off app refresh on iPhone

If you want to turn Background App Refresh on or off on an iPhone, go to Settings | General | Background App Refresh and tap the switch. You can enable the feature when your phone is connected via Wi-Fi and cellular, or just Wi-Fi.

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As I mentioned, you don’t have to enable this option for all of your apps. When the feature is enabled for all apps, they will appear in the settings. Scroll down the list and individually toggle the switch to on (green) or off (gray), depending on whether you want those apps to update in the background.

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Side benefit, at least for me: Doing this exercise is a quick way to see all the apps on your phone in one place, and it serves as a reminder that those you rarely or never use anymore are candidates for removal altogether, thereby freeing up space on your device.

Refreshing apps in the background on Android

Android phones can also refresh apps in the background, though the steps vary by device.

Google Pixel. Go to Settings | Network & internet | Data Saver. Tap the switch to add a check mark, indicating that data saving is on. This prevents some apps from sending or receiving data in the background. It’s also worth noting that when this setting is on, any app you’re currently using may still check for updates, only less frequently. That may require you to tap an image in an app to display it.

You’ll have to take a different route to turn off background refresh for specific apps on a Pixel. Tap Settings | Apps | App battery usage. Now scroll through the list of all your apps and tap the ones you want to restrict background-updating. For each, tap Allow background usage to toggle the setting off or on. You may want to do this even if you previously enabled the Data Saver option.

Samsung Galaxy. Go to Settings | Connections | Data usage | Mobile data usage. Scroll below the graph to see a list of apps on the device. Tap each app you want to allow (or disallow) usage in the background, and tap the App background data usage switch.

An additional option here lets you tap a switch to Allow data usage while Data saver is on.

Follow similar steps to enable or disable background app usage when the phone is connected to Wi-Fi. Only now, tap Settings | Connections | Data usage | Wi-Fi data usage, and again scroll through the apps to repeat or change the selections you made for mobile data.

Whether you toggle the switch to turn the setting on or off under Wi-Fi data usage, that change will be reflected in the Mobile data usage setting as well, and vice versa.

Bonus tip: Google Gemini AI can lend a hand to writers in Google Docs

If you experience writer’s block putting together a newsletter or a project for your job, Google’s AI assistant Gemini may help. You can go from a blank document to a final draft inside Google Docs by simply describing what you want it to create, Google says.

The company used this example in a blog: “Draft a newsletter for our neighborhood association using the meeting minutes from my January HOA meeting and the list of upcoming events.” The AI can spit out a first draft from your relevant files, which you can polish with or without the AI’s help from there.

This is part of an expanding role for Gemini across all Google Workspace apps that Google has just announced, including Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drive. In Sheets, for example, you can build spreadsheets from scratch with the AI’s help.

The features, which are being rolled out in beta, will initially be available only to customers on paid Google AI plans, starting at $3.99 per month under a promotion that climbs to $7.99 per month or higher, depending on your plan.

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Edward C. Baig covers technology and other consumer topics. He previously worked for USA Today, BusinessWeek, U.S. News & World Report and Fortune, and is author of Macs for Dummies and coauthor of iPhone for Dummies and iPad for Dummies. Follow him on LinkedIn; Threads; and X, formerly known as Twitter.