I've recently discovered that, at least on my GS3, there seems to be a significant difference on battery-usage when I back out of a certain app to "exit" versus simply using the home button to return to the home screen.
I've been trying to observe the difference on CPU usage for certain apps when I use the home button to navigate away or just back out of it. For some apps, when I use the home button, the CPU usage seems to behave as it should - it drops to 0%, and the app just sits there, waiting for me to open it again. For other apps, when I use the home button to navigate way, the app will occasionally misbehave and start indiscriminately consuming CPU usage with seemingly no end. I can't really detect a pattern to this, other than it happens with some apps more than others. I'm almost positive this behavior has led to a number of instances where my battery life was just horrible because an app was slowly, but surely, using CPU power in the background.
So, I guess part of this post is the whole "home versus back button" issue. I've seen some posts where people have said there's practically no difference because over time, Android will just clear out the inactive apps if you use the home button to navigate away. But what I'm seeing seems to contradict this advice - these apps are jumping into high CPU-usage the moment I navigate away from them with the home button; will Android ever close that misbehaving app?
I've observed this with apps like Engadget, Pulse (a particular offender), Wapedia, and Facebook. I'm assuming that these are issues with the way the apps are designed (and have notified the developer in some cases) but I'm curious to see whether anyone else is experiencing these issues. I'm just using the built-in task manager to monitor CPU usage.
I appreciate any thoughts or feedback anyone might have on this!
I've been trying to observe the difference on CPU usage for certain apps when I use the home button to navigate away or just back out of it. For some apps, when I use the home button, the CPU usage seems to behave as it should - it drops to 0%, and the app just sits there, waiting for me to open it again. For other apps, when I use the home button to navigate way, the app will occasionally misbehave and start indiscriminately consuming CPU usage with seemingly no end. I can't really detect a pattern to this, other than it happens with some apps more than others. I'm almost positive this behavior has led to a number of instances where my battery life was just horrible because an app was slowly, but surely, using CPU power in the background.
So, I guess part of this post is the whole "home versus back button" issue. I've seen some posts where people have said there's practically no difference because over time, Android will just clear out the inactive apps if you use the home button to navigate away. But what I'm seeing seems to contradict this advice - these apps are jumping into high CPU-usage the moment I navigate away from them with the home button; will Android ever close that misbehaving app?
I've observed this with apps like Engadget, Pulse (a particular offender), Wapedia, and Facebook. I'm assuming that these are issues with the way the apps are designed (and have notified the developer in some cases) but I'm curious to see whether anyone else is experiencing these issues. I'm just using the built-in task manager to monitor CPU usage.
I appreciate any thoughts or feedback anyone might have on this!
