Is there a way to stop background apps from closing when navigating away from them?
If flicking between a few apps they are going back to the starting screen so are being closed when navigating away. I have searched Google and it looks like a bug Nokia are aware of but is there a workaround to stop this behaviour?
I tried switching on Background activity cleaner and setting just one app to be blacklisted as per a thread I found but this does not work and still all background apps are being closed
With 6GB of RAM you would have thought there could be plenty of apps left to run in the background without too much performance issues
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Enjoying Taskiller - works very well.
Most users know their apps run better once unnecessary background apps / services have been killed.
Another set of users continue to complain about specific games or apps being laggy without taking steps to solve the problem.
Case in point is the camera application which needs more memory than most and often gets out of memory exceptions.
What would be great is if Taskiller or one of the other task closing apps could create a configurable desktop shortcut that would kill all unneeded apps, then launch a preconfigured app, e.g. camera app.
Users would need to understand that clicking this button to launch another app will lose state in any running apps, but will most likely mean the game or app they then run will have far better performance and be less laggy.
Any takers?
Though im the tiniest bit of confused...
A) If this app TaskKiller (never used) worked so well, whats the need for another?
B) I am also unsure if its absolutely necessary for the android platform. Maybe older phones or WinMo phones (<6.1) have this problem. But as far as I know, android has a garbage collector in which it treats its processes with priority and after a certain utilization, it ends it (for instance. I am playing gameboid, then just hit the home button. I can go back to gameboid fine. But if I open a large app after 'minimizing' gameboid (like opening the htc music player), gameboid will end and I will have to reload it again. Though if I open msgs while gameboid is minimized, gb stays up.
Its supposed to do that. So this request I am not sure if its really necessary.
Killing background apps when memory requires is the theory behind the OS but doesn't always work in practise.
For example, play any game on Android and you'll see occasional judders in the scrolling, etc. - this is usually because a Facebook or Twitter app on the phone has decided that its a good time to get some new notifications ... but that spoils the game experience.
I hate to mention the fruity phone but this is one of the places where it beats Android hands down and their games are in a different league to ours.
I think a way to clear the phone's background processes before launching a game / resource intensive app would make a big difference.
Is there any way to keep certain background applications running if memory runs low and the android garbage collector goes around killing processes that are running in the background?
I have the problem that under low memory situations android kills all my background apps and especially services. This is ok for most use-cases, but is really annoying especially for my Jabber client and sometimes even the music app.
I looked through the API doc and found that you can set Service::setForeground(true) to prevent the service from being killed. This is nice for open source apps, but I can't prevent closed source apps from being killed that way. And I'm not even sure if it helps in all cases, as the music app should be using it and gets killed too.
Does anyone know how I could exclude certain apps from being killed in the BG? Which process is responsible for doing that? Wouldn't it be possible to patch that process or part of the kernel to exclude certain processes?
I know there are workarounds for keeping the launcher in memory by restarting it all the time. That wouldn't help in my situation where the Jabber service has a permanent network connection going.
Anyone got technical information for me on this?
You created a new thread with [Q] so why don't you create it in Q&A forum. Thread move.
I know that android is very good at handling background processes and ram but I have so many apps that I don't use at all. They consume big amount of ram and for instance, sometimes browser loads pages again when I get back to it from another app. I assume this is because of ram. So I guess, if I can shut down some running apps in the background, available ram would be more.
I can see them at settings-apps-running(or cached processes).
For example, right now in "running" section I have 9 processes and 3 of them are poweramp, awesome beats, accuweather.com and in "cached processes" I have 10 processes and 6 of them are beautiful widgets,calendar storage,google account manager, google search, calendar, google play store. Other processes are system services that I have no problem with. When I go to developer settings-background process limit and block them, there are no cached processes anymore but that probably has a side effect. I wish I could choose which apps I want in the background.
I can shut down these apps manually but every time I restart the phone, they are there again. How can I stop them?
if you rooted, you can use Autostarts or ROM toolbox from the playstore. it can change the receivers of the apps not to start at boot
CooLasFcuK said:
I know that android is very good at handling background processes and ram but I have so many apps that I don't use at all. They consume big amount of ram and for instance, sometimes browser loads pages again when I get back to it from another app. I assume this is because of ram. So I guess, if I can shut down some running apps in the background, available ram would be more.
I can see them at settings-apps-running(or cached processes).
For example, right now in "running" section I have 9 processes and 3 of them are poweramp, awesome beats, accuweather.com and in "cached processes" I have 10 processes and 6 of them are beautiful widgets,calendar storage,google account manager, google search, calendar, google play store. Other processes are system services that I have no problem with. When I go to developer settings-background process limit and block them, there are no cached processes anymore but that probably has a side effect. I wish I could choose which apps I want in the background.
I can shut down these apps manually but every time I restart the phone, they are there again. How can I stop them?
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The simple answer is that you don't need to stop them!
As you say, Android is already very good at keeping track of background processes, to the extent that if a new program needs more RAM, Android itself will kill a background process that hasn't been used for a while to free up RAM for the new program.
The Cached processes screen SHOULD be full of recently used programs; it shows that Android is doing what it is supposed to do and is shifting inactive processes out of active RAM in case you want to load it again, without completely dumping the process memory.
Now, as for the side effect you mentioned, that would be a significant hit on battery life. By holding programs in RAM as it is supposed to do, the OS can load the program quickly and cleanly and more efficiently by simply reading the RAM rather than reading flash, writing to RAM, then reading from RAM. The general mantra for UNIX based systems is that unused RAM is wasted RAM.
Another thing to note is that if you do not close tabs when switching active programs (including going to homescreen) then the Browser is designed to hold that tab in memory. Even if you close the Browser (excluding closing the tab specifically with the "little x"). Even if you reboot the damn phone, it will still load the tabs/pages you had open last. The pages are not held in memory as such, just what was open and what tab order, so if you do open the browser after a while, it will load the last page from scratch.
TL;DR version: The running and the cached processes will remain exactly where they are until a new program needs more RAM than is available, at which point Android will kill something to make room. You do not need to do this manually. It will cause more power drain by making very inefficient use of RAM/Flash memory. Empty RAM is wasted RAM.
whilst Chaos is right, I notice severe performance drops when ram is filled, despite Androids theoretical advantage. It doesnt work...
Best to prevent from loading altogheter.
Root, lose warranty, backup apps, uninstall or freeze apps so the bloatware is removed.
For others, change autostart settings in Romtoolbox. So they wont start on boot.
Search for safe stuff to delete. There are lists for that
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Or just dont install the apps that you dont really need.
Via GtN7000
LoVeRice said:
Or just dont install the apps that you dont really need.
Via GtN7000
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Lol, even then you might still need to remove bloatware lol
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Thanks so much for detailed answers.
Hi, i'm thinking of buying an HTC one and i can't wait for it and i wonder how much of a difference does closing apps make in terms of battery life because it is obvious that having apps running in the background makes the OS feel a lot faster and if it's a minor downside than i'd rather have the upside of having those running in the background.
Hahaahahahahahahahahaahaha. Closing them neither increases battery nor makes the system feel faster... Have you come from an iPhone? (It doesn't make a difference on iPhones either)
nope im coning from glaxy nexus and it does make a difference in it though
According to what I've read, the newer android systems freeze the apps while in the background. I don't know what apps you'd keep open in the background, though. The only one I have keep running is my browser.
Im asking that if im surfing on net and then have to go somewhere, do i have to close apps and then put the phone in my pocket or is just locking your phone and putting it in your pocket is fine.
battle1 said:
Im asking that if im surfing on net and then have to go somewhere, do i have to close apps and then put the phone in my pocket or is just locking your phone and putting it in your pocket is fine.
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Click to collapse
I just lock the phone and put it in my pocket. Does fine for me. I get awesome battery life. Usually your screen is what eats up your battery anyways, again I say usually ;p (always an exception somewhere). Out of all the android phones I've had, this one has the best battery life. Not saying there aren't better, but I can go a whole day with moderate use and still have a little juice at the end of the day. Now granted, if you were playing music, you may want to stop that first, but I figured that was common sense...
battle1 said:
Im asking that if im surfing on net and then have to go somewhere, do i have to close apps and then put the phone in my pocket or is just locking your phone and putting it in your pocket is fine.
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Click to collapse
Just minimize it to the recent apps tray, you can just restore the app where you left off ... Android manages apps extremely efficiently so you don't need to close them, force stop them in settings, use a task manager or any of the above. It actually drains your battery more to kill apps and have them start again, especially system apps that constantly run, than it does to just leave them running.
when you pause an activity (hit the home button, rather than the back button - or venture off to a different activity)
The app does not continue running, however it does preserve the application state (as long as dalvik doesn't kill it, due to higher priority memory allocation requests)
Apps can launch background services, which are NOT paused in the same way (depending on how they are created, of course). In order to force kill all services associated with an app, you'll have to use the app manager.
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As far as performance/battery impact:
- You'd think "Oh, if i pause 50 apps then i'm going to run out of memory?" NO - the dalvik will kill them in the order it deems necessary to ensure a certain amount of memory is always free.
- This also means you cannot count on a paused app ALWAYS being where you left it off. In the middle of writing an important email? pause the app, go look something up in chrome, and come back to the email it MAY or MAY NOT BE where you left it off. (The dalvik could have killed it)
- Paused apps do not account for any CPU time, therefore there is no battery impact.
Services MAY account for cpu time depending on what they're doing - and they will run even when the app is killed depending on how they were registered.
So even in my Galaxy Nexus it's actually better if i don't swipe all the recent apps?
Hi XDA,
I have a problem. After a random amount of time, my recent apps list is empty and it'll just show the text that says something like "this is where you recent apps appear" and the only way I can fix this is with a reboot and upon that reboot when I hit the button to show the recent apps, all the apps I had running before are there. This is a problem because it takes away functionality and after I have so many background apps running that I can't swipe away I have apps that will close randomly or restart such as Maps and Pandora. Pandora especially has just been quitting and Maps has some serious bugs that may just be app related and not related to a huge list of running background apps.
Anyone encounter this issue and/or know of a fix? Or will I be forced to do restarts whenver it starts showing me an empty list?
doratheconquistadora said:
Hi XDA,
I have a problem. After a random amount of time, my recent apps list is empty and it'll just show the text that says something like "this is where you recent apps appear" and the only way I can fix this is with a reboot and upon that reboot when I hit the button to show the recent apps, all the apps I had running before are there. This is a problem because it takes away functionality and after I have so many background apps running that I can't swipe away I have apps that will close randomly or restart such as Maps and Pandora. Pandora especially has just been quitting and Maps has some serious bugs that may just be app related and not related to a huge list of running background apps.
Anyone encounter this issue and/or know of a fix? Or will I be forced to do restarts whenver it starts showing me an empty list?
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Click to collapse
Hi, i think it's a lollipop bug, memory leak called. Search for more information. 5.>1 will fix this.