I wish there was a list out there of apps that potentially make phones on unresponsive.
I've begun to think that it's not so much the Warp's implementation of Android, or even specific apps, that make Android unresponsive and/or unstable, as it is the number of apps trying to run simultaneously and compete for resources in a very limited memory space.
Try this experiment--with background sync on and a WIFI connection available, shut down your phone, restart it, unlock it, and then put it down on the table for five minutes. Then bring up Settings/Applications/Running Services. If you've been installing as many apps as you say, you might find dozens of processes listed on a phone that you haven't even touched since you started it. (While you're on that page, hit the menu key and pick "Show Cached Processes" and you'll see even more apps that have launched automatically since you restarted your phone, but that have already been temporarily swapped out of active memory).
Of course, Android is Linux, and Linux is great at running many processes simultaneously in a limited memory space. And some of us take more advantage of (or maybe abuse) that capability more than others. Personally, if I'm trying to find a better Twitter client, or a better news reader, or whatever, I'll install three or four candidate apps and go back and forth between them to test them out. (20 years writing software reviews will leave you with bad habits like that.)
The problem is that these apps are competing for many resources other than just memory, and each one is registering receivers with the OS telling it, "wake me up every 15 minutes, and wake me up when the system is done booting, and wake me up when WIFI is active", and so on. AutoRun Manager (available on the market) can give you some good insight on how that all happens (and some control over it if you're rooted). On my phone, for instance, AutoRun Manager reports that I've got about 75 apps that have registered one-or-more receivers for various system events. WinAmp alone registers 6 receivers, SwiftKey X--7, Pulse--5, Plume--8, Minimalistic Text--17!, Google+ -- 12, EverNote -- 9, and so on. Apps that include multiple widgets (like Minimalistic Text) tend to be the biggest users of this capability, since each widget registers its receivers separately.
Add it all up -- the number of apps running or ready to run at at any one time, the number of hooks they've planted in the OS, the competition for resources, and it's not surprising that conflicts arise that can destabilize the system.
I suspect that the best advice for making the phone more stable is to:
- minimize the number of apps you install
- use Titanium or something like that to freeze the ones you don't use regularly
- use widgets very sparingly
- use something like AutoRun Manager to prevent the apps you don't want starting up automatically from doing so. (But of course, that could be destabilizing in itself if you disable a receiver that an app expects to have available to it, and the app doesn't recover gracefully from the error.)
(That said, sometimes it's more fun to live dangerously than to follow the "best" advice.)
I think for the most part these issues are endemic to Android itself. Certainly I saw the same things happening on my Cyanogen 7-running Droid Eris, and am seeing them now on my HoneyComb 3.2-based Archos G9 80 tablet. What hasn't been established, as far as I can tell, is to what extent the Warp is more or less susceptible to these issues than any other phone in its class.
