Closing Apps on Android

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Vixen

Soldato
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I got an X10 mini a few days ago and I'm still getting used to how it works so please be patient with me! I have noticed that the phone seems to be accessing the internet when I'm not using it. It's annoying me because it is using 3g rather than wifi and the battery is running down completely in two days.

Is there any way to actually close apps so they stop trying to refresh? Or do I need to go into each app individually and change settings?

Thanks :)
 
Apps are designed to stop using CPU when appropriate, but will remain in memory until the device needs the memory for something else. Task killers will remove it from memory but not stop the apps from relaunching.

The apps relaunch when on a schedule or when it receives a broadcast receiver message from something it has registered with. When this happens the app will do whatever it is configured to do. Many apps like newsreaders, twitter, facebook, stocks, mail, etc, will be configured to refresh their data every few minutes or hours.

What you need to do is go through the configuration settings to disable the background downloading, notifications, scheduled updates, etc. Any that you still aren't happy with or that continue to misbehave will just have to be uninstalled.

Use Juice Defender to keep the radio turned off most of the time, the app will reenable the radio for a few minutes an hour, when the screen is on, or when you load an app to do a download. Juice Defender is awesome as it can extend your standby time to days while still allowing you to get stuff like gmail messages every half hour or so.
 
No, not really. Well, you can, but you shouldn't

The apps running in the background will be things like email, gmail and anything else you have which auto updates. The amount of data used will not be big so I wouldn't worry about it, also, two days of battery is very good, I rarely get through a whole day without charging it up. Its a smart phone, the battery is never going to last very long, expect to charge every night.

If you are interested as to why you shouldn't stop these processes then there are plenty of articles around, just search for task killers.
 
No need to use task managers unless you're using old Android phones with poor hardware. Android manages running tasks very efficiently and battery life is fine if you're sensible about your notifications and what apps you install.
 
I am on a last generation Android phone (T mobile Pulse, basically a HTC Hero specwise). Lots of people have told me that task managers make no difference, however my phone is super quick and responsive when I kill tasks but feels sluggish when Advanced Task Killer is full of left over apps like Market. I am also running Android 2.1.
 
tgomas said:
I am on a last generation Android phone (T mobile Pulse, basically a HTC Hero specwise). Lots of people have told me that task managers make no difference, however my phone is super quick and responsive when I kill tasks but feels sluggish when Advanced Task Killer is full of left over apps like Market. I am also running Android 2.1.
Click to expand...

Autokiller is the best app out there for killing un-needed apps. Now, that sounds like a Task Killer, but it isn't. What it does is set the threshold level for Android to kill apps. This is a built in function of Android, which is why it's recommended not to use task killers.

The thing is, the threshold on the Hero seems to be set too low and it doesn't free up memory until the available memory is quite low. When the memory gets that low, the system lags.

So, using Autokiller you can set the threshold higher, so Android will free up memory sooner, before it gets to that stage of lagginess.

Only downside, you must be Rooted.
 
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