I recently found out the equivalent on the Watch is called the “Dock.” It shows recent apps or ones you marked favorite. It’s similar to the macOS Dock except there’s no indicator showing which apps are open (which changed from a white/blue light to a black dot years ago and I don’t even see the indicator mentioned in their current documentation).
On the phone it’s just a list of the previous apps you’ve used. I’ve noticed when using a third-party podcast app if it is not playing and I switch to and from it the podcast app will have been closed almost immediately even though it shows up in recently used. If battery usage is the concern, I lean on battery activity in settings. It quickly gave me yet another reason to not have the Facebook app installed at all or other drains like having poor cell reception.
I think this has been a long trend everywhere–although, Apple did seem to lead the way for a lot of it. Hardware used to often include some sort of schematics. Professional software would have a physical book of documentation. That seemed to go digital-only around the mid 2000s. I think losing a physical book and move to the web made them less structured and lost them a lot of resources. I think the move to the web relies on great search. A huge frustration working with internal documentation at various jobs is not appreciating that search is how documentation is discovered. A lot of it is spread across different siloed systems (email, wiki, chat, source code) and no time is spent bringing them together. This has happened to consumer goods, too. I picked up a Lego set last week and it included a basic pamphlet that directed you to download the app for assembly instructions. To be fair, I often lose appliance manuals (they’re all saved in a pile inside some drawer) but I aggressively seek out PDFs when I need to reference them.
Apple seems to have pretty good documentation online (not awesome, but not terrible). The problem is you have to know the thing you’re looking for exists, you have an Internet connection (which is a huge issue when troubleshooting), then you have to find it, and lastly, it may not contain the detail you need.
