how can you stop apps from auto-launching?

[Big Ry]

I installed Advanced Task Killer. It seems to work well. You can de-select certain apps for it to inactivate so you can leave your weather or other apps running but not the others. When you touch the icon, they come on again. Easy, I think.

I use it as well. The guy just added the much-needed autokill feature to it, which I was about to move to another app for. I set mine to auto-kill whenever the phone sleeps (nice!) The catch is, before turning on autokill, you should build the ignore list for apps you want to allow to run all the time, then enable autokill. (I found that actually using the ignore list instead of just unchecking the items is much better.)

you do realize that many of the apps youre auto-killing will immediately start back up wasting your battery, right? thats the whole reason for this thread. i dont want them to keep starting up over and over.

[somethinghumble]

Cool thread here, droidies. Keep up the good posts.

I too find myself in need of some way to get rid of as much memory/cpu eating, unused apps as possible. I would like to be able to listen to music and play robo defense at the same time WITH NO LAGGING OR SKIPPING.

Three apps I never use and would love to be rid of permanently are Footprints, Peep and Stocks. How do I stop these apps from auto-launching or uninstall/delete these suckers? I think I'm shooting myself in the foot by using auto-kill apps on these renegade apps due to the cpu continuously reprocessing their start up sequences.

Also, I just use the default music player and sometimes it decides to go into a crazy super fast forward mode, and then my droid is always sluggish when I have to exit whatever app I'm using (sometimes it's just in lock mode). It takes it like 5+ seconds to accept the fact that I've pushed the pause button on the music widget. ARGG!

[bill d.]

Can you confirm hat they're actually using memory while in the background? People seem to assume that background apps do but in most cases they don't in the Android world.

yeah, yeah I can. My Eris used to get down to 25m of free memory when all I had opened was Handcent and the home screen (which was empty, save Weather Widget clock that wasn't on auto update). I kept my updates off, and my widgets to a minimum. Footprints, Voice Dialer, Peep, Google Talk, etc all open themselves in the background for whatever reason and bog down your system. Wish I understand why that happened. Don't have that problem on my Droid at all... Never gets laggy or weird, no matter how much I'm doing.

Cool thread here, droidies. Keep up the good posts.

I too find myself in need of some way to get rid of as much memory/cpu eating, unused apps as possible. I would like to be able to listen to music and play robo defense at the same time WITH NO LAGGING OR SKIPPING.

Three apps I never use and would love to be rid of permanently are Footprints, Peep and Stocks. How do I stop these apps from auto-launching or uninstall/delete these suckers? I think I'm shooting myself in the foot by using auto-kill apps on these renegade apps due to the cpu continuously reprocessing their start up sequences.

Also, I just use the default music player and sometimes it decides to go into a crazy super fast forward mode, and then my droid is always sluggish when I have to exit whatever app I'm using (sometimes it's just in lock mode). It takes it like 5+ seconds to accept the fact that I've pushed the pause button on the music widget. ARGG!

Root and uninstall said programs. haven't had to use a task killer once since I rooted my phone. and this is coming from someone who had to do it once an hour because of how bad the Eris was with opening programs on its own...

[somethinghumble]

thanks billy d. i was thinking about taking that rooting of the phone plunge but hadn't yet committed. i've already spent enough time phutzing with it already... or so i had thought. i'm definitely ready to not have to use an ineffective task killer every time i want to play a game. yeah.

[aminaked]

Apps sitting idle in ram use virtually no cpu/battery. Android automatically frees memory as needed so there's no problem with them sitting there. Autokill/manual kill use resources and are a waste of time.

Best bet is to avoid poorly designed apps that use cpu but don't get you anything. Example, I use a notepad app called Papyrus because it's the only simple one I could find that doesn't autostart. Try to cut down on widgets too. Antivirus and automated task killers are also a waste.

Automated task killers are like driving with one foot pressing the brake and one pressing the gas at the same time. Just let android do it's thing. Use an app's exit/quit button if it has one when you're done.

[Big Ry]

H

Apps sitting idle in ram use virtually no cpu/battery. Android automatically frees memory as needed so there's no problem with them sitting there. Autokill/manual kill use resources and are a waste of time.

Best bet is to avoid poorly designed apps that use cpu but don't get you anything. Example, I use a notepad app called Papyrus because it's the only simple one I could find that doesn't autostart. Try to cut down on widgets too. Antivirus and automated task killers are also a waste.

Automated task killers are like driving with one foot pressing the brake and one pressing the gas at the same time. Just let android do it's thing. Use an app's exit/quit button if it has one when you're done.

Again, this is just heresay

[tameone]

Background apps use memory. Their state information needs to be saved somewhere so it can be restored upon request. I imagine it's held in the volatile DRAM, which requires constant refreshing in order to maintain state, and thus, uses battery. CPU cycles? I don't know, but probably not.