My wife recently bought me a Toshiba Thrive Android tablet (yep, she’s pretty AND thoughtful!) that I love. It has worked better than I ever thought a tablet could and I don’t think that I will ever go back to a laptop. One thing I have noticed however is the launching of apps in the background that take up available memory. Apps that seemto start on their own. I might have a Web browser open and the Facebook app, but them I will launch a program I installed called"task killer"and find all of these random apps running. Sometimes ten or more! I used"task killer"on my Android phone as apps that I used would sometimes keep running after I switched to another app, but I don’t recall finding random apps running in the background on the phone. Are these apps checking for updates or something? It really hasn’t been a problem and I haven’t noticed a slowdown or anything, just wanting too know why the apps seem to start themselves. I am running Android OS 3.2 Honeycomb if that helps.
This isn’t an Android exclusive issue. I also have a iPhone 3G and it seems to have a real and annoying problem of not releasing memory from recently used but closed apps. Even more annoying is the lack of “task killer” type apps available for the iPhone. The only solution is to power of the phone and turn it back on. A definite slowdown happens with the Apple, bad enough to damn near make the phone unusable at times. Anyone know of a memory manager available for the iPhone or a reason there isn’t one available?
The short ansewer is apple does not want you to be able to control tasks, it detracts from the user experience and may cause bad things to happen to the iphone which will induce stock crashing and such.
There was at least one app for the iphone, but that got pulled from itunes, so I think you would have to jail break the phone and check out whats available from cydia.
First of all, task killers do more harm than good in most cases. There’s plenty of documentation about this, do a quick search if you want the technical details.
Second, it’s entirely normal for apps to run in the background on any Android device. These apps are usually cached background processes sitting in memory to make launching a quicker task. Anything that syncs information, like Facebook, email, etc, is going to start automatically.
Killing these tasks actually doesn’t save battery. Android doesn’t work like Windows, it runs well regardless of the amount of ram available - unless it’s really low. When it needs more ram, it automatically kills off processes based on priority. Cached processes get killed first, so there’s no reason to kill these off yourself. Try losing the task killer and see if you notice a difference. If you do and want to go back to the task killer then go back to it. I’ll bet that you’ll be just fine without though.
Thanks for the info, I want aware off that. As I mentioned in my OP, I have never noticed a slow down, more habit of me checking.
Thanks for this info too, although Apple is a bit too smug on this point as what really detracts from the user experience is trying to type an email and each letter takes four seconds to appear on the screen because all the memory is taken by closed programs. I like the iPhone, but IMHO the user experience of my Android phone was much better and the IPhone, even the new ones, aren’t even in the same league as my wife’s new Samsung Galaxy Android phone. Apple once had the lead, but I get the feeling they have rested on that lead and need to come up with something ground breaking to best the newest Android phones. Of course I am not trying to turn this into an Android vs Apple flamewar, just my opinion from using both. If my iPhone died today, I wouldn’t consider another.
Just as an FYI, you can kill apps on the iPhone. From the home screen, press the hardware button twice, and you’ll see a list of your open apps appear along the bottom. Press and hold on any of them, and a ‘—’ sign will appear in the corner of the icon. Tap the ‘—’ to close the app.
As others have noted, you don’t need to do this for memory management (the OS does a pretty good job of that), but it is useful when an app is acting wonky and you want to reset it without power-cycling.