Does force closing apps have any benefit on iOS devices?

I've gotten mixed answers from various websites and people concerning this question, and I wanted to put it out there for all of you to answer once and for all.

The question is, does force closing apps, (that is, double-clicking the home button, then swiping up on them), have any benefit to the battery or overall performance of an iPhone or any other iOS device?

There's been much debate and discussion around this topic. I believe it was beneficial for iOS back in the v3 and v4 days but now it's not.

Craig Federighi even came out recently saying it's not necessary and it doesn't increase the battery life. Apple has built-in their memory management the proper time to suspend and/or kill an app when necesssary. The only time you should force-close an app is if it has become unresponsive.

In one circumstance, a force quit can have a benefit to iOS that outweighs the cost of more processing needed to clean up the process, restart it, and purge any files that are cached/open.

The negative to doing this is that apps don't run in the background - so once you switch to a new app or the springboard / list of icons / lock screen - iOS has already stopped / paused / flushed all filesystem activity for the app.

It signals to a frozen app that it needs to fully reinitialize itself from scratch - disregarding any saved state or cached results. It signals to Apple in the form of a crash report (and optionally to the developer) some breadcrumbs exactly where the app was in the code when it was "killed" by the user.

• In terms of performance - force quitting apps makes iOS and the app perform worse - measurably worse in many cases.
• In terms of battery life - force quitting apps makes iOS and the battery life perform measurably worse as well.

Think of it like surgery - you are doing clear harm in the short term - unless you are sure surgery is needed, don't take the performance hit and force quit.