4 ms·

Lifehacker is still recommending task killer apps? Those things are almost entirely regarded a Bad Idea™ among the Android crowd.

roboneal 16y ago
I count myself among the "Android crowd" and Advanced Task Killer has nearly tripled the battery life on my T-Mobile MyTouch slide post-installation. I can't cite a single negative side-effect of using it for the past 3 months.
- joeyo 16y ago
  Which apps are you "killing" that are putatively improving your battery life?
  - roboneal 16y ago
    T-mobile has built in apps deployed with their "skin" like "My Account" and "Genius Button" - that will always "hang around" if not killed. Your mileage may vary from phone to phone.
    - ergo98 16y ago
      Hanging around = doing absolutely nothing, sitting in memory that is unused. The paradox is that people using task killers often force the system to keep restarting apps it wouldn't have had to restart. This is the same nonsensical behavior that has people clearing their file system cache because it's "leaking memory". My other post has been modded down, so I'll save the niceties: Most of the people who swear by ATK do so because they are ignorant, either knowingly or because they've been misled by others.
      - roboneal 16y ago
        Nice crusade you are on here - I guess you can put me in your somewhat implausible "knowingly ignorant" group. Maybe you were modded down for being in the "knowingly troll-ish" group.
        jrockway 16y ago
        You're being downmodded because you're wrong. If you want T-Mobile's stuff to go away, install a ROM that doesn't have those things. Moving my stock myTouch3G to CM was the best thing I ever did; T-Mobile's image is massively out of date and sucks. Install up-to-date software, and the phone works much better. Yeah, I know "average users" don't want to root their phone and install custom firmwares, but you aren't an average user. Use your intelligence to solve the problem instead of convincing yourself you're working around it.
- wwortiz 16y ago
  I use advanced task killer as well and I must say it makes little difference in my battery life (maybe adds an hour or so as grooveshark and a few others like to start up randomly) but it is nice to have it to kill apps in an easy way if I want to.
- ergo98 16y ago
  >I count myself among the "Android crowd" and Advanced Task Killer has nearly tripled the battery life on my T-Mobile MyTouch slide post-installation. And eating cheerios for breakfast makes your hair grow faster. You are suffering from the placebo effect. You are deluded.
  - jrockway 16y ago
    Shame you are downmodded, as you are 100% correct.
- jrockway 16y ago
  I doubt it. Android does not work that way; activities that aren't being used don't run. They exist in memory, and "killing them" removes them from memory, but that doesn't affect battery life. Now, if you install every app from the Market and don't use them, then that can be a problem, because some apps do run in the background. But that is a very special case. Things like Maps, Browser, etc., aren't eating your battery life. Things like updating Twitter every 30 seconds are. Telling Twidroid to update your tweets every 15 minutes instead of every 30 seconds will save more battery than all the task killers in the world ever will.
  - shimi 16y ago
    Some activities can be linked to services that will run with no regards to the Activity lifespan. Most implementations will have a stopService in the Activitie's onDestory so if that's the case killing a task may disable a running process.
    - jrockway 16y ago
      Indeed, but most users of task killers don't kill the background processes they actually want. They set those to update every nanosecond, then kill useless things like Maps, Browser, Contacts, etc., that aren't actually draining their battery. (Alternatively, there are some nasty apps that start at boot and won't quit, like Sipdroid. Those you have to kill with fire. But it's a special case, and not how normal users use task killers.) The other case is the homescreen-killing issue; that is something task killers can give the illusion of fixing. But it's better to install CM, enable compcache and swap, and never deal with that BS again. I did that, and it staved off my need to spend $600 on a new phone. Task killers, in comparison, did nothing, because they don't solve any underlying hardware problems (or work around them in a clever way, like compcache).
    - extension 16y ago
      No need to speculate, just go to Settings -> Applications -> Services. I currently have 26 running apps and 3 services (Twitter, keyboard and Google messaging). You can kill them there too. Better yet, Settings -> About phone -> Battery use. Display and Cell radio usually dominate this list.
- jsz0 16y ago
  I gotta believe Advanced Task Killer isn't the 4th most popular app on the Android Market simply because of a placebo effect. I think maybe it has less to do with misbehaving background apps and more to do with general wonkiness these days. When you experience those weird events like dial pad lag, missing notification sounds, slow home screen switching, ATK can fix that very quickly. The only other option is a phone reboot which takes a few minutes. From talking to my friends with Motorola Droid's I'm starting to believe a lot of this is HTC Sense and not Android itself. They don't seem to have as many of those random WTF moments. (ie, audio from two apps playing at once, audio playing while you're on a phone call, etc)
  - commandar 16y ago
    If you are having these problems, it means you have a misbehaving application. The task killer is a bandaid that hurts your battery life slightly less, but you'd be best off removing the offending app.
- commandar 16y ago
  If you saw that kind of improvement, you had a misbehaving app.
rogermugs 16y ago
its not the apps, its the multitasking-killing-the-battery i still don't understand. a phone that needs to be charged even once (let along 3 times) in the middle of the day is simply not usable. end of story. i dont get it.
jrockway 16y ago
Indeed. The problem is that the original Android devices (Dream/Sapphire/Hero) were shitty hardware with barely any RAM. So the GC algorithm killed peoples' homescreens when they loaded a big app, and they assumed that background tasks were causing that. They killed something like "Maps", switched to a tiny app, and noticed that their homescreen didn't get killed anymore, so clearly Task Managers are necessary. Oh well, sometimes a feeling of control is enough to make you feel less bad about having shitty hardware, so I guess task killers are good for that reason.
- commandar 16y ago
  I honestly believe that's the only reason task killers are as popular as they are. That and memory management is so complicated that most people don't really understand it. See also: NT6.

roboneal 16y ago

I count myself among the "Android crowd" and Advanced Task Killer has nearly tripled the battery life on my T-Mobile MyTouch slide post-installation. I can't cite a single negative side-effect of using it for the past 3 months.

joeyo 16y ago
Which apps are you "killing" that are putatively improving your battery life?
- roboneal 16y ago
  T-mobile has built in apps deployed with their "skin" like "My Account" and "Genius Button" - that will always "hang around" if not killed. Your mileage may vary from phone to phone.
  - ergo98 16y ago
    Hanging around = doing absolutely nothing, sitting in memory that is unused. The paradox is that people using task killers often force the system to keep restarting apps it wouldn't have had to restart. This is the same nonsensical behavior that has people clearing their file system cache because it's "leaking memory". My other post has been modded down, so I'll save the niceties: Most of the people who swear by ATK do so because they are ignorant, either knowingly or because they've been misled by others.
    - roboneal 16y ago
      Nice crusade you are on here - I guess you can put me in your somewhat implausible "knowingly ignorant" group. Maybe you were modded down for being in the "knowingly troll-ish" group.
      - jrockway 16y ago
        You're being downmodded because you're wrong. If you want T-Mobile's stuff to go away, install a ROM that doesn't have those things. Moving my stock myTouch3G to CM was the best thing I ever did; T-Mobile's image is massively out of date and sucks. Install up-to-date software, and the phone works much better. Yeah, I know "average users" don't want to root their phone and install custom firmwares, but you aren't an average user. Use your intelligence to solve the problem instead of convincing yourself you're working around it.
wwortiz 16y ago
I use advanced task killer as well and I must say it makes little difference in my battery life (maybe adds an hour or so as grooveshark and a few others like to start up randomly) but it is nice to have it to kill apps in an easy way if I want to.
ergo98 16y ago
>I count myself among the "Android crowd" and Advanced Task Killer has nearly tripled the battery life on my T-Mobile MyTouch slide post-installation. And eating cheerios for breakfast makes your hair grow faster. You are suffering from the placebo effect. You are deluded.
- jrockway 16y ago
  Shame you are downmodded, as you are 100% correct.
jrockway 16y ago
I doubt it. Android does not work that way; activities that aren't being used don't run. They exist in memory, and "killing them" removes them from memory, but that doesn't affect battery life. Now, if you install every app from the Market and don't use them, then that can be a problem, because some apps do run in the background. But that is a very special case. Things like Maps, Browser, etc., aren't eating your battery life. Things like updating Twitter every 30 seconds are. Telling Twidroid to update your tweets every 15 minutes instead of every 30 seconds will save more battery than all the task killers in the world ever will.
- shimi 16y ago
  Some activities can be linked to services that will run with no regards to the Activity lifespan. Most implementations will have a stopService in the Activitie's onDestory so if that's the case killing a task may disable a running process.
  - jrockway 16y ago
    Indeed, but most users of task killers don't kill the background processes they actually want. They set those to update every nanosecond, then kill useless things like Maps, Browser, Contacts, etc., that aren't actually draining their battery. (Alternatively, there are some nasty apps that start at boot and won't quit, like Sipdroid. Those you have to kill with fire. But it's a special case, and not how normal users use task killers.) The other case is the homescreen-killing issue; that is something task killers can give the illusion of fixing. But it's better to install CM, enable compcache and swap, and never deal with that BS again. I did that, and it staved off my need to spend $600 on a new phone. Task killers, in comparison, did nothing, because they don't solve any underlying hardware problems (or work around them in a clever way, like compcache).
  - extension 16y ago
    No need to speculate, just go to Settings -> Applications -> Services. I currently have 26 running apps and 3 services (Twitter, keyboard and Google messaging). You can kill them there too. Better yet, Settings -> About phone -> Battery use. Display and Cell radio usually dominate this list.
jsz0 16y ago
I gotta believe Advanced Task Killer isn't the 4th most popular app on the Android Market simply because of a placebo effect. I think maybe it has less to do with misbehaving background apps and more to do with general wonkiness these days. When you experience those weird events like dial pad lag, missing notification sounds, slow home screen switching, ATK can fix that very quickly. The only other option is a phone reboot which takes a few minutes. From talking to my friends with Motorola Droid's I'm starting to believe a lot of this is HTC Sense and not Android itself. They don't seem to have as many of those random WTF moments. (ie, audio from two apps playing at once, audio playing while you're on a phone call, etc)
- commandar 16y ago
  If you are having these problems, it means you have a misbehaving application. The task killer is a bandaid that hurts your battery life slightly less, but you'd be best off removing the offending app.
commandar 16y ago
If you saw that kind of improvement, you had a misbehaving app.

rogermugs 16y ago

its not the apps, its the multitasking-killing-the-battery i still don't understand. a phone that needs to be charged even once (let along 3 times) in the middle of the day is simply not usable. end of story. i dont get it.

jrockway 16y ago

Indeed. The problem is that the original Android devices (Dream/Sapphire/Hero) were shitty hardware with barely any RAM. So the GC algorithm killed peoples' homescreens when they loaded a big app, and they assumed that background tasks were causing that. They killed something like "Maps", switched to a tiny app, and noticed that their homescreen didn't get killed anymore, so clearly Task Managers are necessary. Oh well, sometimes a feeling of control is enough to make you feel less bad about having shitty hardware, so I guess task killers are good for that reason.

commandar 16y ago
I honestly believe that's the only reason task killers are as popular as they are. That and memory management is so complicated that most people don't really understand it. See also: NT6.