Apps that seem to open on their own.

[robbversion1]

I've been using advanced task killer for a while now and every so often I go in myself to check which apps are open. And no matter what 'News and Weather' and 'Skype' will always be open. I dont run these apps and I dont have widgets for them either.

Could anyone tell me why these would be opening on their own?

[harrellj]

They open on their own because the system wants them to load faster for you on the off chance that you will eventually want to use them. The only way to stop them from loading is to uninstall them, which is only possible if you're rooted.

HOWEVER, I'd highly recommend getting rid of ATK, or at least turn off the automatic killing feature. Every app it kills, the OS will relaunch, which will get killed and then relaunched, over and over and over. This kills battery and slows down the system. The OS will kill apps that are taking up memory when it needs to, but the OS also prefers a full memory (takes just as much CPU/battery to keep the memory full as it does to keep it empty and full memory means apps launch just that much faster).

[robbversion1]

They open on their own because the system wants them to load faster for you on the off chance that you will eventually want to use them. The only way to stop them from loading is to uninstall them, which is only possible if you're rooted.

HOWEVER, I'd highly recommend getting rid of ATK, or at least turn off the automatic killing feature. Every app it kills, the OS will relaunch, which will get killed and then relaunched, over and over and over. This kills battery and slows down the system. The OS will kill apps that are taking up memory when it needs to, but the OS also prefers a full memory (takes just as much CPU/battery to keep the memory full as it does to keep it empty and full memory means apps launch just that much faster).

hmm....do you happen to know if beautiful widgets ties into 'news and weather' ? It does display weather so i'm wondering if its getting its data from that app.

[harrellj]

I honestly don't know. I know one of the choices with BW is to use Google for the weather information though. However, like I said, turn off the auto-killing feature of ATK and really, don't worry about what is running.

And unfortunately, I can't help deduce whether BW uses the News and Weather app, because I do use it (and BW).

[Skull One]

I've been using advanced task killer for a while now and every so often I go in myself to check which apps are open. And no matter what 'News and Weather' and 'Skype' will always be open. I dont run these apps and I dont have widgets for them either.

Could anyone tell me why these would be opening on their own?

Those apps are tied to "Events" in the Android OS. When the event fires off, it loads the app if currently not in memory and tells it what caused it to fire off. An example:

I used to use the EBay app, but I got tired of it launching in background every time I switched from WiFi to 3G. For some idiotic reason, Ebay's developers decided to hook to the "Service State Changed". They don't need to, but alas it caused it to always be in background. I eventually uninstalled the app.

I was finally able to re-add it to my useful list when I found autostarts on the market. It allowed me to change if a program is allowed to be called when their event is triggered. Of course your phone must be rooted to do this.

There are at least 24 major events that can cause an application to load into memory in background. And 1000s of smaller ones that programmer can create. It is both the beauty and curse of the Android OS.