Apps keep running after killing them? help

[chipgilkey]

Ok im sure you guys answer this all the time but i am a noob to the droid and am asking for your wisdom here lol.

I switched from and HTC touch where you have to kill the programs after your done or it will slow it way down and waste battery.

So i get the adv task killer app on my droid (version 2.1) and start using it HOWEVER shortly after closing certain apps they just restart!

Some of them i never use like corporate calendar and voice search and others.

Do i need to shut these down to conserve speed/battery or are these just dormant apps that arent currently affecting anything, again thanks sooo much.

[warrior21]

The is no real reason to have an app killer on your droid. There are apps that will run in the background and that is completely normal. App killers tend to cause more problems than they help

Sent from my Droid using Tapatalk

[FormerIphonePreuser]

This happens to me as well.

[chipgilkey]

i read the thread about using the apollo task manager however i cant find it in the market

[FormerIphonePreuser]

I have it.Its there,just keep looking.

[Sweettooth]

Task killers are a controversial item on these forums; if you have one and it works for you, keep it. If you're having unexplainable problems, start by removing it. That being said, I use TasKiller free which I've used since I got the phone in December and haven't had any really weird problems to speak of. It might not be required but I have a number of apps on my phone that once opened, will continue to run indefinitely until the phone is powered off and I couldn't imagine knowing this and not being able to do anything about it. The Droid is a computer, and computers have task managers.

Depending how yours works, you can put certain apps in your Ignore List, then there should be a setting you can check to kill all apps when the screen turns off. This is a nice feature because you can ignore things like Email, Gmail, Live Wallpapers, etc... and let everything else, including the apps that start themselves, take a hike without any user intervention after the screen times out. Give it a try.

[takeshi]

Task killers are a controversial item on these forums.

There's a lot of misunderstanding. One, you have people migrating over to Android from other devices that are used to OCD levels of management of resources. Android will kill apps as needed. Background apps in general do not consume power.

Two, there are a lot of newbies who are actually causing themselves more problems. Some of them think they can increase battery life by killing off apps when they're really decreasing battery life since apps restarting will consume more of the battery.

In cases where there is an app misbehaving a task killer can be helpful. However, in such cases you really need to address the problem app rather than dealing with only the symptoms. In short, it all boils down to:

1. Don't assume that Android is like your former non-Android device.
2. Don't fix it if it ain't broken (i.e. if you're not actually having problems then leave the background apps alone unless you really know what you're doing).

[jsh1120]

...
Do i need to shut these down to conserve speed/battery or are these just dormant apps that arent currently affecting anything, again thanks sooo much.

99%+ of the time, the answer is that they are not affecting anything. Take Takeshi's advice to heart. A program "in memory" is not necessarily "running." It's just easily accessible if it needs to run.

There are two reasons to have a task killer. One is simply educational. You may be interested in what the o/s is doing. For this purpose Advanced Task Manager (not Advanced Task Killer) is useful since it distinguishes between apps in memory and service that are actually "running."

The other is that unlike the iPhone o/s, Android imposes almost no restrictions on multitasking demands of third party apps. Nor is there a code review for apps in the Market that "qualifies" apps. Thus, there can be badly written apps that DO consume system resources unnecessarily. These are pretty few and far between but it is possible to have, say, a messaging app that constantly polls for messages or an app that unnecessarily uses GPS functionality on a regular basis.

If you notice a sudden degradation of performance or battery use, it's useful to see if a recently installed app is constantly using resources and cannot be controlled via the options in the app, itself. Killing such an app can help you pinpoint the problem.

But having said that, don't simply assume that because breakfast comes before lunch, breakfast "causes" lunch. In other words, it is rarely the case that performance/battery problems come from a single app. Its far more likely that they stem from interactions among multiple apps.

Finally, for those apps that came with the phone that you "never use" and cannot "kill," stop worrying about them. Trust that Google has designed them in a way that does not use resources (though they're in memory) unless you proactively use them.

[chipgilkey]

...
Do i need to shut these down to conserve speed/battery or are these just dormant apps that arent currently affecting anything, again thanks sooo much.

99%+ of the time, the answer is that they are not affecting anything. Take Takeshi's advice to heart. A program "in memory" is not necessarily "running." It's just easily accessible if it needs to run.

There are two reasons to have a task killer. One is simply educational. You may be interested in what the o/s is doing. For this purpose Advanced Task Manager (not Advanced Task Killer) is useful since it distinguishes between apps in memory and service that are actually "running."

The other is that unlike the iPhone o/s, Android imposes almost no restrictions on multitasking demands of third party apps. Nor is there a code review for apps in the Market that "qualifies" apps. Thus, there can be badly written apps that DO consume system resources unnecessarily. These are pretty few and far between but it is possible to have, say, a messaging app that constantly polls for messages or an app that unnecessarily uses GPS functionality on a regular basis.

If you notice a sudden degradation of performance or battery use, it's useful to see if a recently installed app is constantly using resources and cannot be controlled via the options in the app, itself. Killing such an app can help you pinpoint the problem.

But having said that, don't simply assume that because breakfast comes before lunch, breakfast "causes" lunch. In other words, it is rarely the case that performance/battery problems come from a single app. Its far more likely that they stem from interactions among multiple apps.

Finally, for those apps that came with the phone that you "never use" and cannot "kill," stop worrying about them. Trust that Google has designed them in a way that does not use resources (though they're in memory) unless you proactively use them.

VERY WELL PUT! I know so much more now that i read your post. What i did was downloaded the apollo task thingy like in the other thread on here and set the auto kill function HOWEVER, all of the apps that are constantly running and restaring (like you mentioned) i put on ignore so now only apps getting killed are the browser and stuff like that that i must open for them to run,

[Sweettooth]

My biggest thing is the Browser and games, they are showing up in TasKiller in yellow (i.e. consuming resources, NOT running as a background process) and the OS will never kill them. This doesn't sit well with me. If I go on a game playing spree and go from one game to the next I might have 3-5 games I'm not even playing but their process is still running and consuming memory. In this case I see no other option than to manually kill them. You combine that with some heavy browsing and there is a clear decrease in performance that the Android OS is not addressing.

That being said, I totally agree with leaving most processes alone, but things like the browser and any other cpu intensive applications should have a means of being killed if the OS wont recognize you're not using it anymore, otherwise it's Blackberry all over again.

Any of you who use Firefox know that as good a browser as it is, it's process uses a hell of a lot of memory over time (try leaving a window open all night and check task manager). Now imagine that even after you close all associated windows, the process still continues to run? That'd be awful. Instead, WINDOWS is smart enough to realize that all associated windows are closed and it kills the process. To add more power to the argument, it manages this and still comes with a stock task manager to view various information and kill processes if need be. Regardless of the expertise put into this device, it should have a task manager by default. It is a power device, and there should be a good level of user control. If this weren't the case, there wouldn't be so many people rooting their phones.