Database Users

Back button does NOT end applications!!!

So, after installing Task Manager and opening it I had 31 applications running in the background! Yup, you read that right, 31!!! I ended them all and started playing around. I would launch and app, hit the back button and then go into Task Manager and there it was, still running. I launched several applications hitting back aftewards and they were all still running. I even tried hitting home aftwards and still running. Oh, and I had some apps running twice!!! WTF!?!? Looks like I found a major flaw in the new 2.1 OS.

This is normal android behaviour.
Apps are only shut down when the phone runs out of memory, however if the app is not doing anyting it will be paused and not use any battery / cpu.
And since the nexus has 512MB RAM it can have a LOT of open applications
If it is a background app (like im) it usually has an exit button in the menu.

Apps always run on android if you don't end them with a task manager.

Ya, normal behavior. The app actually has to intentionally end itself when you press the back button for that to really end it. I wouldn't worry about it, though. Apps in the background tend to use very little RAM and CPU.

Not sure why people are freaking out about apps running in the background... This is normal and Android does an amazing job of freeing up memory by killing apps as NEEDED.

Hmmmm, guess I never looked at it that way. I do notice it gets a little sluggish when all of that is running in the background. I'm just used to my MT3G. I've NEVER seen that many apps running at once.

setzer715 said:
Hmmmm, guess I never looked at it that way. I do notice it gets a little sluggish when all of that is running in the background. I'm just used to my MT3G. I've NEVER seen that many apps running at once.
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try two and two-thirds the amount of RAM and that would explain how you get so many apps running lol.

david1171 said:
try two and two-thirds the amount of RAM and that would explain how you get so many apps running lol.
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Ha-ha, good point!!!

From my experience the apps never close it is set to idle and is stored in the phone memory therefore decreasing startup time and allowing for a better multitasking experience but on all other previous android devices there wasn't as much memory so only a few apps could run at a time before the memory would be needed so something would get closed.

You're used to having 37.5% of the ram the Nexus One has
Now here's the question: does having 31 apps open affect battery life?

Paul22000 said:
You're used to having 37.5% of the ram the Nexus One has
Now here's the question: does having 31 apps open affect battery life?
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It depends on the applications. If they just sit quietly when suspended (in the background) and don't do anything, they will have no impact on battery life (because their threads will never schedule/run). If they continue to do work while in the background, that will have some impact, however, unless they hold a wakelock (something they need the "keep phone from sleeping" permission to do), they will have no contribution to battery consumption while the screen is off and no other apps/services hold wakelocks.
In short, "it depends."
The menu / settings / about phone / battery use panel tries to give you as much information as possible about what apps/services are consuming your battery.

martijnve said:
This is normal android behaviour.
Apps are only shut down when the phone runs out of memory, however if the app is not doing anyting it will be paused and not use any battery / cpu.
And since the nexus has 512MB RAM it can have a LOT of open applications
If it is a background app (like im) it usually has an exit button in the menu.
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Click to collapse
Yes. Traditional multitasking (WinMo, BlackBerry) phone OSes will not close an application (or program, on WinMo) until you tell it to close, or it decides to close itself. This is a resource hog, and results in the freezing up or running painfully slowly that we have come to expect from those devices. The iPhone always runs fast because it ALWAYS closes an app--no multitasking whatsoever--so it never runs out of resources and slows down. It "pauses" the app, then closes it, so when you open it, it resumes right where it left off, as if it were open the whole time. The downside is nothing gets done in the background--which is why awesome apps like Locale or Screebl won't run on iPhone. Android is the best of both worlds. It leaves apps running until it NEEDS to close them. When resources run tight, it pauses apps just like the iPhone, so it stays running fast, but as long as you don't overload the system, you can run background apps. And background services will stay running.
Paul22000 said:
Now here's the question: does having 31 apps open affect battery life?
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I'm sure it does some, but with that monster of a CPU, and as little power as apps use when they're sitting in the background not doing anything, I'm guessing it is a negligible difference. But that's why I love Advanced Task Manager's auto-end feature.

i lol'd -----------__________----------------

When you have 31 applications running, is there a hardware key that you can press (perhaps with a third party software) to show those which are running, and to switch to anyone of them instantly without resorting back to the application menu? Also, does this same tool let you shut down an active tasks in order to conserver memory and battery life? I understand that a long press of the home key only shows the last 6(?) application launched but not necessarily the currently active tasks.
On my jailbroken iPhone, I'm used to be able to double click the home button to show all active tasks, and there I can switch to or terminate anyone of them. While running an application, I also have the option of long pressing the home button to end it directly so that it does not continue running in the background. If I do a normal home press, the application will continue running in the background, and I'm presented with a screen which lets me jumps to any of the desktop in order to launch new applications.
I hope I can have the same level of convenience here.

All of the applications in the backround are essentially in hibernation - it is part of the way Android manages the RAM. I think it's great.

Close apps properly?

I was messing trying to figure out which is the correct method to close apps, back and home do the same thing, holding HOME (i just found out) brings up a list of recently used apps, but i can't figure a way to properly close them. I have Advanced Task Manager to close them now and again but I don't want to keep it running all the time.
Is there any proper way if the app doesn't provide an exit function?

Because an app is on that list does not mean it is not closed. That list is just the history of the last 6 apps you used.
A lot of people say that you do not need to worry about whether or not an app is fully closed because the software manages that to ensure that it has enough free memory. I don't know enough to know whether that is correct or not.

peterc10 said:
Because an app is on that list does not mean it is not closed. That list is just the history of the last 6 apps you used.
A lot of people say that you do not need to worry about whether or not an app is fully closed because the software manages that to ensure that it has enough free memory. I don't know enough to know whether that is correct or not.
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Yes, sorry, the apps I'm referring to are shown by the Advanced Task Manager, I merely found the Recent list when trying to find a way to exit apps.
I sometimes have 15-20 apps in there filling up my RAM even on startup things like Shop Savy will be there twice and Photoshop.com.
They, amongst others don't seem to provide options to prevent them starting at boot so I simply uninstalled them, but all the running apps do severely affect the performance when it's filling up.

I have been experiencing the same problem.
Advanced Task Manager lists a whole load of apps that start on bootup and each one of those doesn't have an option to disable this.
After a while (about 3 hrs or so) of using my Hero I am down to about 40mb of RAM which if I don't use Advanced Task Manager to kill unused apps my Hero begins to lag big time.

On the Android it is better to leave them resident in memory than stop them, unless they are 'background' processes and there is something wrong with them (a bug) making them slow down your phone.
Don't judge your Android on amount of free memory left; if anything, the the less memory left over the better as it means the memory is being used effectively to make it nice and speedy.
Processes aren't allowed to consume CPU cycles/consume battery/slow your phone down when they are not focused; the exception is background processes which need to keep going, like the music player etc. What's more, if an app is not focused then its state is preserved allowing your phone to free up its memory when needed; its memory effectively becomes 'cache' allowing it to restart quicker if it happens to have stayed in memory.
So don't worry about wiping an app from memory; for many apps there is simply no distinction between closing it and switching away from it; as soon as you switch away from it it's as good as closed; it's not slowing your phone down or taking up any memory that couldn't be freed instantly if needed, but if it is lucky enough to stay in memory it will re-open quicker.

On my experience, if you press the back button to exit an app, then the app is closed properly, running the code in the app that will release the memory and objects. This is the best way.
The only app it will not work on is the browser as the back button will send you back through the history.
Try it...

MercuryStar said:
On the Android it is better to leave them resident in memory than stop them, unless they are 'background' processes and there is something wrong with them (a bug) making them slow down your phone.
Don't judge your Android on amount of free memory left; if anything, the the less memory left over the better as it means the memory is being used effectively to make it nice and speedy.
Processes aren't allowed to consume CPU cycles/consume battery/slow your phone down when they are not focused; the exception is background processes which need to keep going, like the music player etc. What's more, if an app is not focused then its state is preserved allowing your phone to free up its memory when needed; its memory effectively becomes 'cache' allowing it to restart quicker if it happens to have stayed in memory.
So don't worry about wiping an app from memory; for many apps there is simply no distinction between closing it and switching away from it; as soon as you switch away from it it's as good as closed; it's not slowing your phone down or taking up any memory that couldn't be freed instantly if needed, but if it is lucky enough to stay in memory it will re-open quicker.
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I understand how and why this should be true, but for me it doesn't seem to be, if my memory falls to less than 40 the phone becomes increadibly unresponsive, I get crashes and have to wait forever for it to do things like open the phone. Immediately after killing all with advanced task manager it goes back to normal.
barryallott said:
On my experience, if you press the back button to exit an app, then the app is closed properly, running the code in the app that will release the memory and objects. This is the best way.
The only app it will not work on is the browser as the back button will send you back through the history.
Try it...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have tried both methods, more often than not though, back doesn't seem to do much either, I have experimented with free RAM and using back or Home, it seems the Home certainly isn't the correct way to do it, but back doesn't work very often either, maybe people aren't coding their apps properly to respond to the back button as an exit method?

this is the never ending discussion whether task manager make sense for android or not.
i'm one of those who say: definetly YES! USE TASKMANGER.
I understand that Android works in a way that taskmanager shouldnt be needed because it handles the tasks on its own, but sadly the concept just doesn't seem to work.
When my ram fills up i can cleary see that the device is getting slower, even just opening apps takes more than 5 seconds. After closing some apps the hero is fast again.
now i don't care whether ANDROID is the reason or some POORLY programmed background apps, because the outcome for me as a user is the same. I#m using advanced task manager and im very happy with it, whenever Android starts to slow down i close the open and unneeded apps, and everything is fast again...don't know how people can claim that Android does handle task management perfectly on its own.

Shahpur.Azizpour said:
this is the never ending discussion whether task manager make sense for android or not.
i'm one of those who say: definetly YES! USE TASKMANGER.
I understand that Android works in a way that taskmanager shouldnt be needed because it handles the tasks on its own, but sadly the concept just doesn't seem to work.
When my ram fills up i can cleary see that the device is getting slower, even just opening apps takes more than 5 seconds. After closing some apps the hero is fast again.
now i don't care whether ANDROID is the reason or some POORLY programmed background apps, because the outcome for me as a user is the same. I#m using advanced task manager and im very happy with it, whenever Android starts to slow down i close the open and unneeded apps, and everything is fast again...don't know how people can claim that Android does handle task management perfectly on its own.
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The point is, Task manager of any kind is another 3rd party app taking up more memory, and quite frankly on such a high end phone i shouldn't have to worry about this problem. I noticed another thread about changing the values at which the internal task manager kills apps etc, if it becomes more of a problem i'll look into this method of fixing it.

alias_neo said:
The point is, Task manager of any kind is another 3rd party app taking up more memory, and quite frankly on such a high end phone i shouldn't have to worry about this problem. I noticed another thread about changing the values at which the internal task manager kills apps etc, if it becomes more of a problem i'll look into this method of fixing it.
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yes, in theory we shouldn't worry about tasks in the background, but in reality as you said, the device WILL slow down. so there is no other way around than closing apps manually and defining apps to be kept alive by the 3rd party task manager.
changing values for the internal task manager sounds like something which would only work on a rooted device, but im not sure...

fickle browser

The web browser should be Google's most stable and capable app, that's where google should shine. I wont rehash all of my browser problems (yes I've tried 3rd party browser apps) because I trust google and ill be patient for software updates to make the browser more functional. But sometimes from the browser I press home, send a text and when I go back to browser I'm at my homepage but other times same sequence and I'm at the same page that I was on before I pressed home and sent the text. I know its not my task manager. I thought maybe it was a setting but sometimes it doesn't take me to my homepage and sometimes it does. Does anyone know how I can consistently go to browser and be at the page I was on when I last left the browser? I want it to restart via my task manager at the times I have it set to but I need to be able to press home, carry out various functions and still have the same website up. I'm almost positive its user error but I don't know what to do. And yes I used the goddammed stupid search function. Thanks for any help...

Android has a built in task manager itself, as well, that closes apps as need be to free up RAM for current processing. As well, if you have a 3rd party task killer, it can get pretty dicey, even if you have browser "excluded". Also, keep in mind that your task manager uses up RAM itself, and in all honesty is not needed unless you really want to close tasks, and in that case just use Astro.
Anyways, 99.9% of the time the browser is where I left it at. I would say 100%, but I can't be 1000% certain the browser has never been closed by the built in task manager.

I remember having that problem constantly with my G1 but haven't run into it yet with my N1. As the guy before said, its likely that the memory manager is killing the browser app. Here are a few questions I would look into:
1. Are you using an advanced launcher? This can open a NEW window, but won't close an old one
2. How many apps do you have installed? The more apps you have the more that will boot on startup, eating away at memory
3. How many messages do you have? Maybe there are so many that the messaging app is logging all the memory.
4. Are you running CM5 with the highmem hack? If not, this sounds like a good excuse for you to root.

I've noticed that if you launch the Browser by using Home <Long Press> it often tries to reload some previous page that you were at. If you launch the browser directly from the home screen / app tray, it doesn't do this.
Very weird.

Not really able to multitask due to constant low memory situation?

Hi,
I don't think this is limited to my device so I am asking here. Are you guys really able to multitask on your devices? On mine I start the web browser then I switch over a couple of apps and when I try to go bqck to the browser it gets launched all over again. Of course it remembers all the pages I have opened but they get reloaded. The same happens to other apps all the time. That drives me crazy. I installed an app called System Panel that I used to have on my HTC Desire and it shows that there are a lot of background services running and out of 700 megs of RAM it's only 50-80 free memory. Among those running apss there are services of widgets that I have never used like AP widget, world clocks, Yahoo finance, samsung hubs and etc. That's insane that such stuff occupies memory while apps that I really use gets killed so eagerly. Is there any way to improve on this behavior? My HTC desire seems to handle more apps at once than my GalTab :O
Marcin
Sent from my GT-P7500 using Tapatalk

I'm with you about the browser. So irritating that pages are reloaded when you leave the browser. I put starburst ROM on mine so I'm not sure if that took care of the RAM issues, but the reloading browser is pure fail. (BTW- I use dolphin for pad and it's the same).

I guess it's more a matter of the OS killing background apps to retain memory than the app behavior.
In Android an app(it's called an Activity) cannot forbid the operating system from killing it when the OS decides to. An app can only gets notified about the event of being killed to persist its state to be able to restore it later. And the browser does that.
What the problem really is here is that because of a lot of bloatware(including background services of Samsung hubs, Yahoo widget, Associated Press widget) running in background the OS is not having enough memory to keep the user apps runinng. So soon afther an app is put into background it gets killed to make space in memory for other apps.
And as far as I know killing thresholds for available memory are set to around 56 MB. And this happens to be around how much free memory is available for most of the time. So it makes any app put in background to be killed almost immediately. This makes the OS that is supposed to have an edge over iOS in terms of multitasking to be in fact able to run a single app at a time
And ifor example my HTC desire that runs vanilla Android 2.3.4 (Oxygen) seems to run with close to 200 MBs (out of 576MB built in according to the specs) of free RAM during normal operation. I do not use any task killers or any similiar tools. This makes the OS to easily handle multiple apps in background.

So, the question becomes: "how do we [permanently] kill all those background bloatware processes?"

freeze them with titanium backup

U guys realize it only reloads browser pages if u back out or hit the home button right? X the tabs out and ur browser will not do this
The only app that ever shows me the low memory msg is logmein ignition
Sent from my GT-P7510 using XDA Premium App

This is not really what we are talking about here. Try it this way. Open any page in a browser. GMail for instance. Log in and leave it this way. Now open the task switcher and go to some other app (e.g. Tapatalk). Navigate through some other apps and then select the task switcher and try to go back to your browser. You will notice that it was shut down silently and now it's started again. All previously open pages will be reloaded at this point. On my HTC Desire using the same scenario I end up with a web browser screen restored with the already open page not being reloaded. It even remembers what part of the page I scrolled down to.

bandit_knight said:
This is not really what we are talking about here. Try it this way. Open any page in a browser. GMail for instance. Log in and leave it this way. Now open the task switcher and go to some other app (e.g. Tapatalk). Navigate through some other apps and then select the task switcher and try to go back to your browser. You will notice that it was shut down silently and now it's started again. All previously open pages will be reloaded at this point. On my HTC Desire using the same scenario I end up with a web browser screen restored with the already open page not being reloaded. It even remembers what part of the page I scrolled down to.
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Click to collapse
So the honeycomb memory management system is doing its job and freeing up memory when the browser is in the background idle. You are complaining?

bluskye said:
So the honeycomb memory management system is doing its job and freeing up memory when the browser is in the background idle. You are complaining?
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Well, it does not really. I just rebooted my device and noticed that now I can switch between tasks without having the one that I've just put into background immediatelly killed. Also after the reboot there is around 300 MB of free RAM compared to 50 MB thad I had after a few days of use. Also the entire device feels way more snappy now. Doesn't it look like a memory leak?

I have not seen this problem - can have many things running and still have close to 100mb memory free. Doesn't seem to have got worse from a few weeks usage, either. But I have noticed some running processes that I have never even opened, which is strange. Solution is definitely to root and then freeze the things you don't need, but personally I am not going to do this as my memory seems fine. You could try taking off certain widgets and not running certain programs after reboot to see if one thing in particular causes a big memory drain. Social Hubs? I have never even opened this as it caused a mess on my Samsung phone.

Poor RAM management

I'm finding the RAM management on the S8+ and probably therefore the S8 to be heavily throttled.
My device memory is split as:
4GB total:
System and apps: 2.8GB
Available: 600MB
Reserved: 639MB
The problem I am seeing is that I am never seeing memory consumption above 2.8GB so that the last 600MB is never touched whatever I open. This aggressive throttling is evident If switch between a mere 5 or 6 open apps, the first ones opened have been closed and have to completely re-open and re-load even though there is a is about a 600MB chunk of memory sitting around so this last 600MB is being totally wasted. This is validated when I go to the built in memory manager within Device maintenance and it only shows the last 3-4 apps opened as being active. Believe Samsung needs to adapt the memory management to be less aggressive here as it is impacting on multitasking quite severely.

Right now I have system and apps using 2.4gb., Available space 1gb, reserved 639mb.
I find that if you back out of an app by pressing back, it closes and you have to reload, such as facebook, messages, phone, gmail etc.
I find that if I use the home button to back out of apps they remain in memory. Apps like facebook have to resync when I go in but are still in memory.
What apps are you using to have them close on you?
Exynos or Snapdragon? Mine is UK Exynos maybe there is a difference.

I'm multitasking, so using the app switch button. I'm not backing out which closes apps. Processor is nothing to do with apps closing and I have Exynos. In my experiments I'm using the web browser, whatsapp, email, music player, maps and samsung health.

Hasn't it been like that for ages, Jonathan-H?

i can understand the op's point, especially if multitasking is needed, but the behavior described is actually a good thing for a phone. otherwise you can have too many apps eating up memory that you don't want. the phone doesn't know the user intends on multitasking back and forth. there was a time when there were pages of complaints about apps staying on after user moved on from it, so this is specifically something they would have designed for. there's no right answer here short of a full adaptable ai of some kind.

Unfortunately even Pixel is bad with RAM Management. Till now only Oneplus 3 and Xiaomi Mi5s Plus with 6 GB of RAM keep many apps in memory. I had an iPhone 7 Plus before S8 Plus and all the apps were in the same state like when I left them even after one day. So till now iOS is the fastest OS for me because it keeps apps in memory. Even Youtube stayed in Memory and on S8 Plus it reloads after one hour. I guess it's about keeping battery under control on S8 Plus and this is the reason. On the other hand, the first time launch of apps is faster on S8 Plus compared to iPhone. If somehow Android can keep apps in memory and also control the battery consumption, it can be perfect.

standard101 said:
i can understand the op's point, especially if multitasking is needed, but the behavior described is actually a good thing for a phone. otherwise you can have too many apps eating up memory that you don't want. the phone doesn't know the user intends on multitasking back and forth. there was a time when there were pages of complaints about apps staying on after user moved on from it, so this is specifically something they would have designed for. there's no right answer here short of a full adaptable ai of some kind.
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Click to collapse
If you never get to use the RAM you paid for then it is not a good thing. It's poor RAM management. We're not talking about it closing down apps once the RAM is even close to the limit, we're talking about it closing apps withing minutes and long before the last 20% of RAM is used up which is a sizeable chunk. And having RAM empty is old school thought which is now accepted to be bad practice and was just a benchmark used to see that your system was not being stressed. These days it's better to have as much in RAM as possible rather than waste it empty and have the system need to reload things.

standard101 said:
i can understand the op's point, especially if multitasking is needed, but the behavior described is actually a good thing for a phone. otherwise you can have too many apps eating up memory that you don't want. the phone doesn't know the user intends on multitasking back and forth. there was a time when there were pages of complaints about apps staying on after user moved on from it, so this is specifically something they would have designed for. there's no right answer here short of a full adaptable ai of some kind.
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Click to collapse
For serious multitaskers like me, it leads to the opposite problem: apps keep getting reloaded from scratch and that ruins battery life even more.

I'd like to add my voice into this. I am also a heavy multitasker. I have a set of standard 6-8 apps that constantly keep getting kicked out of memory and closed out of the carousel. It is not a RAM limitation issue as I am, like the OP, always below the limit. It just seems that Samsung made the memory management much too aggressive. I already set all possible options in the OS to control what is monitored and suspended and such, but this made no difference.

Same for me. At first reading this I though I posted this because of the exact numbers.

Jonathan-H said:
. Apps like facebook have to resync when I go in but are still in memory.
What apps are you using to have them close on you?
Exynos or Snapdragon? Mine is UK Exynos maybe there is a difference.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If it is 'forced' to refresh the displayed content it is not keeping it in memory.
You need to use a device where the issue is not exhibited to see how memory management should work.
Sadly my S8 Exynos can not keep more than half a dozen apps fully in the background without then forcing the content to reload/refresh when going back into those apps, from Facebook, YouTube, Photos, Gallery, newsstand, Play Music.
dhorgas said:
I'd like to add my voice into this. I am also a heavy multitasker. I have a set of standard 6-8 apps that constantly keep getting kicked out of memory and closed out of the carousel. It is not a RAM limitation issue as I am, like the OP, always below the limit. It just seems that Samsung made the memory management much too aggressive. I already set all possible options in the OS to control what is monitored and suspended and such, but this made no difference.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Exactly my issue and I have done likewise to no avail unfortunately.
Sent from my S8 using Tapatalk

The last update of the Gallery from Play Store made it start almost instantly. Maybe they need to put all the stock apps in Play Store so they start fast. About the difference between App refresh and App reload, it's totally different thing. We all agree with refresh and we don't like reload.

Android Doze
The problem is Android Doze, which freezes every app once it's in the background. Solution is simple: Settings -> Device Maintenance-> Battery -> Battery usage -> Optimize menu -> All apps. Untick the ones you need and, probably, they will remain in memory for while. So far, working for me.

so no solution to this thus far?? any root tweaks or build prop tweaks useful to solve this??? or we still have a dump phone