Apps killed but still running?

[Guest joshjw]

I really like my Samsung Galaxy S2, but battery has still been an issue. I don't know what it could be, but does it have anything to do with the apps, because when I have finished using the phone I kill all apps with Advanced task killer, and then an hour later after being on stand by, there is baout 10-15 apps running again, and I haven't even touched anything. Is it to do with the phone, is it faulty or somat? By the way my phone isn't flashed. Thanks.

[Guest hondaguy]

I really like my Samsung Galaxy S2, but battery has still been an issue. I don't know what it could be, but does it have anything to do with the apps, because when I have finished using the phone I kill all apps with Advanced task killer, and then an hour later after being on stand by, there is baout 10-15 apps running again, and I haven't even touched anything. Is it to do with the phone, is it faulty or somat? By the way my phone isn't flashed. Thanks.

there are apps that the system needs running in the background for other apps to work, and there are apps that are open but inactive, so they are not using any battery life. on older versions of android task killers were needed, but on the newest versions they cause more issues than they solve. if you keep closing system apps the os will keep restarting them, which wastes more battery. there are many (many, many, many) threads all over the internet on why you should not use task killers. just google search it and read them for yourself so that you will understand what your device is doing.

sometimes an app can cause issues in the background and it is beneficial to kill it, but you will have to look at them on an individual basis. also, make sure you arent killing apps that you have set to auto-update themselves as they will keep turning on after you kill them. the only apps that auto-update on my phone are the gmail and market apps, everything else is set to manual refresh so they dont run in the background.

you can check the running services on your phone (settings, apps, running services) and see what is running and what is sitting in ram. the first tab shows the running processes and if you press menu it will give you the option of seeing the cached processes. the cached processes are not really doing anything, but by being open they will allow the app to restart right away when needed.

there are also apps that i will never use, so i use titanium backup to freeze these apps (makes them invisible to the os) so that they cannot be used unless i defrost them. there are threads at xda that talk about which ones are safe to freeze so you dont have more issues.

[Guest dfghggfgfd]

I really like my Samsung Galaxy S2, but battery has still been an issue. I don't know what it could be, but does it have anything to do with the apps, because when I have finished using the phone I kill all apps with Advanced task killer, and then an hour later after being on stand by, there is baout 10-15 apps running again, and I haven't even touched anything. Is it to do with the phone, is it faulty or somat? By the way my phone isn't flashed. Thanks.

You don´t have to kill Apps on Android, the System does it for you, in fact this is counterproductive. Apps loaded in the memory don´t cause any harm and also don´t need any battery-power if they do nothing. The RAM-refresh is a hardware-circuit and the hardware doesn´t know which part of the RAM is "used" and which "unused", so it has to refresh the whole RAM. Therefore it is better to have something useful in the RAM instead of wasting much of it.

The multitasking-paradigm of Android is to give the User the experience like all Apps are running constantly, so you can switch to any App without a noticeable delay.

Obviously there is not enough RAM on a phone to really run every App at one time. But to get close to it, Android doesn´t really close your Apps until it is needed.

This has 2 benefits:

Reopening an App which is already in the RAM is faster, and this also means the App doesn´t need to be reloaded from the permanent storage, which saves energy.

When you "exit" an Application it has to save its current state. This means, if you open a new Application, which needs more memory than currently available, the OS can immediately close one of the background-apps to free the memory for the new app. If you want to use the killed application again, its state is simply restored, so it appears to the user that it was never closed.

You need a lot of processes to keep the phone running, so the phone can ring and answer calls when you get one, or simply receive a SMS, or to ring the alarm and show reminders from the calendar.

There are also processes to run the GUI and many other things.

These processes/apps will be reloaded if you force them to close to keep the phone running, otherwise the complete phone would crash.

Reloading and restarting the processes of course will need some energy.

If you force an application to close it also can not be guaranteed that the app already has saved its actual state, which can lead to problems with the particular app.

Android also preloads often used applications to the RAM, so it will start faster when you actually use it. Constantly "cleaning" the RAM just means that Android will recognize a lot of free RAM and again preload applications, which again uses energy.

So the bottom line is, don´t use any taskmanager/taskkillers or whatever, when you don´t need them. Let Android take care of the application-handling, it usually does it much smarter then any human could do.

There is only one situation where a task-killer can be helpful. If an applications gets into an infinite loop it could constantly use CPU-cycles without doing anything useful. This of course will prevent the SoC from going in one of its low-power-states and can eat up your battery quite quickly. In this, and only in this situation it can be useful to kill the particular app that has gone mad.

So the useful thing the taskmanagers can do is to monitor the current cpu-utilization. And if you notice an application to constantly use lots of CPU-power without doing anything you should kill it, and if it happens often with one application you should probably deinstall it.

[Guest petrosy]

Most of those apps are not really doing anything. However the wifisharing can drain battery.

The easiest way around this if it annoys you is doing the following.

Download Titanium Backup... I would get the paid version as its an awesome app and should be supported. In the list of apps on your phone if you click/touch them you get teh option to FREEZE the app which will stop it from loading. Freezing the app will completely disable it thus preventign it from running until you DEFROST the app.

Good way to block all the extra SAMSUNG stuff loaded onto your phone.