Lets have a few words on Android task managers/killers, their impact on battery life and my personal experience using Android task managers.
Some time ago, when I finally retired my old Nokia phone and switched to an Android based smartphone the first thing to install, besides an antivirus was a task killer. You may ask why was an Android task manager the second must to have application for me. Well, almost every friend that owned an Android phone had one. For me, the guy with the old Nokia phone it was telling me that a task manager is a must. Shortly after that I realized I have developed a new form of OCD. Every time I had the phone in my hands I was pushing the kill all useless tasks button on my new found task manager. It started to puzzle me. Why do I need to do this to save battery on my phone? Why does this happen on Android phones? Why isn’t Android have such a functionality built in? And then I started my research on what Android task managers really are, why these applications are almost useless and what are the alternatives to save battery life.
Now that I have your attention, let’s look at what a task manager/killer is. Well, in general terms, a task killer is an app that is capable to terminate other apps by forcing them to quit. Sometimes this functionality can happen automatically, without user interaction. The motivation behind this functionality is that by forcing applications that run in background to quit you save battery life by clearing used RAM. Is this really true? Developing an OCD to kill background apps really saves battery life? Well, the debate around this subject is intense. Some claim that task killers are really helping them while others say that Android task killers are bad.
But why all this task killing? In my opinion, the leading cause for task killer apps high popularity is just a simple misunderstanding. Most smartphone user also have a personal computer at home that runs Windows or a Mac OS. By having many tasks open inside these operating systems you naturally use resources such as RAM or CPU. Using RAM or CPU consumes power. Incorrectly using this cause-effect idea, many smartphone users draw the same conclusion. Having many tasks open on your smartphone uses power and reduces battery life. The natural solution to this “problem” naturally came in the form of Android task managers and killers. Well, sorry to wake you up but this is WRONG.
You see, Android is not Windows or Mac OS. Task on your Android smartphone do not run like tasks on Windows for example. In recent Android versions, once you push the home button to exit an application, that applications stays in background. Sometimes it still does a bit of work and eats away CPU and power but most of the time it enters a suspended state. It is still in RAM but does nothing, it consumes no power. The next time you use the same application, if it is loaded in RAM, Android presents you the application in the same state you left it. Normally, when you open an app for the first time, it gets loaded from storage and put inside RAM. When you open the same application again, if it is still loaded in RAM, Android skips the load from storage part and presents you the application from RAM. Task managers interfere with this by killing apps that reside in RAM. So every time you open that app, after being killed by some sort of task manager you force Android to load it from storage. And yea, that consumes power. So instead of saving power by forcing some suspended application to quit, because it uses RAM, you drain more power by loading that app from storage every single time. There are some more things to note.
First of all, RAM is finite. At some point some application will need to use RAM and if Android finds out that there is not enough available it will kill some suspended apps to make room for the loading app. It does this automatically, you don`t need to interfere. Android has it’s own task manager, no need for any other “super save battery juice by killing apps” tool.
Another thing to note is that a fully loaded RAM consumes the same power as an empty one. It does not matter if you have a freshly booted device or an extensive list of background apps loaded in RAM. Basically, the battery feeds the same amount of power to the RAM. Before jumping on me and yelling that by using a task killer you saved power or your device ran faster let em tell you this. Not all apps are the same. Some are badly designed and may eat power even in background. If you feel that a task manager is helping you then check out what apps do you have installed, what are they doing and think if those apps are necessary. The performance gain you feel after clearing the memory is often caused by killing that one app that is bad, for example an app that keeps connecting to the internet even if not necessary. You gain nothing by killing all background apps at once, you only force Android to load those apps again from storage and drain more power from battery.
If you don`t have an Android task manager installed don’t bother to install one. You won`t gain much from it. Instead change the way you use the phone to save power. Turn of the GPS when you don’t need it for example. Those that have a task manager installed don’t abuse it and don’t turn on any automatic task killing function. And if you feel that your Android task manager is saving battery life, check out a more helpful app called Watchdog Task Manager Lite that lets you monitor which app is misbehaving. Don`t save power by killing all background apps, save power by uninstalling bad apps.
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