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Noob Question? Appkiller?

D

Dendore

Member
So I am admittantly a noob at android. My friend has a mytouch, and he has an app I think is called AppKiller. Its essentially a task manager that allows him to view running processes and force quit them. He says he needs this because apparently if you just back out of an application it doesnt fully close. Is this true? Is this app needed? I kind of have trouble believing Android would be that inefficient. Is it just dropping pointers or actually still running the programs in the background?

Again he has a mytouch? Maybe just that phone? Maybe earlier versions of Android? I am looking at getting a Nexus One.... do I need to get this (or similar) App to keep my phone running well without reboots?
 
Apps do run in the background, however the phone will close them out once it gets low on memory or it's been a while since it's been used, etc.
App killers are useful I suppose if your phone starts acting sluggish, but I use an Eris without any of those and it runs fine.
Now, a phone like the beastly Nexus One won't have any problems at all with sluggishness with that sexy Snapdragon processor.
 
Dendore said:
So I am admittantly a noob at android. My friend has a mytouch, and he has an app I think is called AppKiller. Its essentially a task manager that allows him to view running processes and force quit them. He says he needs this because apparently if you just back out of an application it doesnt fully close. Is this true? Is this app needed? I kind of have trouble believing Android would be that inefficient. Is it just dropping pointers or actually still running the programs in the background?

Again he has a mytouch? Maybe just that phone? Maybe earlier versions of Android? I am looking at getting a Nexus One.... do I need to get this (or similar) App to keep my phone running well without reboots?
Click to expand...

It really isn't a necessity, but a great application to have. The beauty of android (as opposed to iPhones for example) is the ability to simultaneously run multiple apps. With smaller processors it can lag but only if you have a lot of apps running in the background. I use advanced task killer to kill anything I have running in the back i choose to shut down. It may seem like a task at first but for me its become reflex and my mytouch runs pretty smooth all day. And this is prior to root im speaking of.
 
On the Droid, I haven't seen any noticeable difference in performance between using an app killer and not using one so I have quit using one all together.
 
my battery runs down really fast if I don't use the app killer every time I finish an app and use the killer to get rid of its useless rotting corpse.

I am really annoyed that ever application doesn't have a "quit right now and I mean really" button.

What drugs are the s/w guys on that they don't have a way to exit an application....
 
elboggo said:
my battery runs down really fast if I don't use the app killer every time I finish an app and use the killer to get rid of its useless rotting corpse.
Click to expand...

Did you read the link in the post above you? I can almost guarantee that your battery doesn't drain any faster without using the app killer.
 
milrtime83 said:
Did you read the link in the post above you? I can almost guarantee that your battery doesn't drain any faster without using the app killer.
Click to expand...
From the link you gave me

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I have seen some claims that battery life improves with the use a task killer but unless you are running a lot of network applications I don't see it happening based on the way Android is designed to let apps sleep. I know I haven't seen much difference than the reported life of folks that use a kill all task killer three or four times a day. Based on what I know about Linux I can safely say that I don't see any real reason for using a task killer to ever kill all applications on a Hero. You might gain a momentary bump in battery life by not having an app check something here and there but you would lose it again when you have to load everything every time you start an app. And the degrade that you would have in performance just isn't worth a few minutes of battery life in my opinion.
=================

These assertions are not consistent with my own experience using eris.

First off, I see absolutely positively NO degradation in performance from killing and restarting the applications. By the time I come back to an application, I don't remember what I was doing previously, and the time spent loading the application is small anyway. Every time I go to the browser, for example, I mean to go somewhere else.

One exception of course is turn by turn direction, but I have the option of not killing the browser at that point.

Further, charging my phone annoys me -- it will reduce the battery life (at least in all my past experience).

Secondly, I have in fact noticed that the battery lasts longer in the way that I use the phone now that I have started killing the applications as soon as I am done with them. My wife has an droid and I have an eris. We both noticed the increased battery life.

Manufacturers can assert whatever they want -- perhaps your experience coincides with that assertion, mine does not. By the way, I kill all applications as soon as I am done with them -- not just 4 or 5 times a day.

Personally, it annoys me to no end when my desktop is cluttered up with stuff I was using two weeks ago, like some people's machines I see. I keep only as many windows open as are necessary to accomplish the task at hand. I am quite flustered that there is no easy way to kill applications from the menu. The app killer menu is only a poor excuse for having designed the interface correctly in my opinion.
 
Sounds like the thing I want. I'm asking the developer about the payment schedule now. Hopefully this will take care of my needs.

thanks for the idea!
 
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