How to Force Quit an Application for iPhone 3.0

Normally, you can force quit an iPhone application by pressing and holding down the HOME button for around 6-8 seconds in firmware 2.2 or lower. But as Apple released the iPhone 3.0 OS, this method does no longer work. The HOME button shortcut is now preserved for invoking Voice Control, which is a new feature introduced in iPhone 3GS.

So, how can you force quit an application for iPhone 3.0?

Why do You Want to Force Quit an iPhone App?

Before talking about the How, you probably have a question in your mind why you need to explicitly quit an iPhone application. Let say you finish using the Stock application and you press Home button to go back to home screen. You may think that you already quit the application.

But not really…

The fact is the Stock application does not actually quit and it’s just “hidden” somewhere in background. So, next time, you launch the Stock application again, iPhone will just unhide it and put it back to foreground. This can certainly minimize the application load time for subsequent launch. But there is always a trade off. As the application is hidden in background, it takes up certain amount of iPhone memory. So, sometimes you probably like to free up more resources for your iPhone by explicitly quit those unused applications.

So, how do you Force Quit an iPhone app?

For iPhone 3.0, to explicitly quit an iPhone app, you should first press and hold SLEEP/POWER button until the power off slider shown. Then you can press and hold HOME button for a while (around 6-8 seconds) to quit the iPhone app. And, it will automatically bring you back to the home screen. That’s it.

Power off iPhone

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Tagged as: iPhone 3.0, iPhone Tips

{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Kamal July 13, 2009 at 11:08 pm

Hi Simon,

If you have a jailbroken iphone, this can be easily accomplished by installing SBsettings through Cydia. It has the option to view and kill any processes that are running at any time. Give it a shot!