Should You Use a Task Killer?

[oOMavrikOo]

I've discovered that there's a balance between the Android OS and TKs, and performance and battery life. On one hand, when I use a TK, my phone speeds up but batt. life is terrible. If I let the OS control everything (as it should be able to), I have great batt. life but experience dispicable lag.

The balance that I've found in the OS and using TK is... Basically just use your TK at start up to save your batt. from your third party power hogs (while it's still on a charger). Just use the "kill all" feature this one time. Make sure you keep your ignore list updated to keep widgets and your other useful apps from being killed and you having to manually reastart them. Disable the TK afterwards and let the OS do its thing. Occasionally you'll need to open the TK once or twice a day to kill an app that you've started but didn't close and just realized it once you see your batt. start to die.

Another thing you should do to preserve this balance is restart your phone every two to three days. This keeps things fresh. Hope my ideas and strategy helps.

 

[Lukehluke]

I don't personally use a task killer as my phone works perfect without one.

 

[lekky]

I just wanted to add another negative for task killers. They're a pain for developers. We get bug reports saying that our program stops working. I feel snarky repling and saying Are you using a task killer? If you want the program to work, don't kill it... but often it is the cause of the problem they're having. I've actually added code to one of my apps to detect ATK and warn the user about using it. It has helped reduce the number of emails I've gotten.

And on the other side I get furious emails about how one of my apps restarts all the time (Why in the world would it need to start by itself! Even after I've killed with Uber Task Murder 5.0!) and I have to explain that task killers don't work (Especially not on Froyo) and Android just restarts things automatically because it sees something got messed up.

lol, well feel free to refer them to my article

What I mean is specifying that the fact that one has a task killer installed does not mean they use it to kill tasks as usually these apps have more features than just killing tasks and there is nothing wrong with using it to unsinstall apps, monitor stuff etc., etc.

It's surely obvious my article is about killing apps!

 

[jimmy_bish]

On the flip side, the more recent Eclair firmwares for the Galaxy S come with a task killer preinstalled by Samsung. And quite frankly, the phone gets VERY sluggish if you don't use it.

Also, in response to the "if Android needed a task killer, Google would have included it", tell that to those people who put up with the lack of being able to close apps properly in Windows Mobile 2003 through to 6.5.
While we're at it, I'll go one step further and say that my iPhone 3G is one of the very few running really well with iOS4 on it. Why? Because it's jailbroken and uses a task killer. Without it, there's never any free memory and the phone needs to be rebooted. This is because Apple disabled multitasking, but not the ability for apps to run in the background. You need the task killer to free ram again, since Apple cut that piece of the interface out.

These are just a couple of examples of OSs being improved using 3rd party tools. All in all, I believe the need for a task killer would come down to the device, software, and rom used.

 

[uzee]

ok everyone i think is an important issue and for this reason i have created a poll in the general section. http://androidforums.com/android-lounge/164475-better-worse-performance-task-killer.html

I feel we gonna get mixed views and not just the obvious choice.

 

[takeshi]

i find it's comparable to religion, there are those who believe and put their faith in it, and there are those who think its voodoo, and then there's the pagans with their damn iphones

More so in the sense that many don't actually understand what it is that they believe or bother to actually read up to understand things better. Understanding the Android OS is step one in realizing why task killers only address symptoms rather than the actual problems. What's worse is that many noobs don't realize when they're causing themselves more problems.

It's ultimately up to the individual but most people really can't determine whether a given action and the perceived effects are coincidentally related or if there's actually a causal relationship. I suspect that this leads to a lot of incorrect assumptions that devices run better because of a task killer.

There are certainly situations where you'll need to kill a task. I'm not saying that there's no point to them. It's not an all-or-nothing deal but explaining such subtleties to noobs isn't easy and it's simpler to just tell them "Task killer bad" which doesn't really help the discussion.