Keep specific apps open in background - Samsung Galaxy S8 Questions and Answers

I know that the S8 toggles some apps into "standby mode" to save energy when they haven't been used for a few minutes.
However, anyone can edit the list of apps that are being turned into standby and there's a few apps (mainly games) that I want to keep active.
Of course those games are not in my list but nevertheless they restart when I launch them agajn from the overview of active apps.
That sucks and I don't really get it.
I had a very cheap China phone with 1 GB RAM before my S8 and although I had about 10 apps opened, my games never restartet if I switched back over to them.
The S8 has 4 GB RAM, yet it restarts my games or is not capable of keeping them open.
Can I do something about that?
Pokémon GO is one of those games. I play it, press the home button, chat with Telegram, open the app overview to switch back to Pokémon and it starts over, showing me the NIANTIV logo and the loading screen.

Related

Multitasking or lack of!

Im new to android i was using iphone before i got Galaxy S with gingerbread and i've noticed that if i don't use an app for a while, it gets automatically killed. For example i quit browser, or the music player, or basically any other app using the home button. Than if after a few minutes i try to return to them, but they have to load up again. This can get annoying, since almost every time i open a link in browser to view my twitter feed/resume music playback after a while/open a book/etc. the app has to load up everytime.this never happend on iOS i could open many and go back to them will be right where left of but why dosent this happen on my galaxy s? is something wrong with my phone or is just android.
+1
seems to me Android hasn't fully matured yet
But when I take my former 3GS in my hands, now my wife's, it feels sluggish and I'm missing things.
i was using 3gs before this and honestly even now using 3gs such amazing experience compared to android no lag or thing like that,but is there any mod or app that can fix the multitasking issues? evertime i close the browser to go play a song or watever n open the browser again it has to load the page all over again just like pretty mch all of the apps
There is nothing wrong with your phone or android. You said that you leave the phone for a while and then go back and you had to open the apps up again and they had to re-load. This is normal because when you press HOME to get out of them, they are kept in the memory for a short amount of time before your phone kills them off as it thinks you're not using them anymore.
If you were using say.. APP1 and then press the home button to go back to your homescreen and launch APP2, then press the home button again to go back to APP1, everything will still be the same.
But if you don't go back to APP1 for a long time, the OS kills it off to free up resources and stop background apps from eating your battery.
iOS doesn't have true multitasking, it simply freezes the current state of the app and you can pick it up again when you switch back to it. For example, in Android you can press the home button to switch away from MSN messenger, but it will still be running, you can still receive messages etc. However on iOS, if you press the home button to switch away from MSN messenger, it will momentarily sign you out and freeze the app state and then re-sign you back in when you go back to it.
I hope that helps
I have often heard this argument of "Android is true multitasking" vs "iPhone only freezes the current state of the app" and (even as a veteran Android user) I think iPhone's solution works better in practical terms.
Most of the time, with mobile computing, users switch between apps but don't really care if they are actually still "running" in the background or not - they just don't want to have to keep reloading applications from scratch everytime. For this, iOS is perfect as it almost seamlessly resumes an application the user last accessed several hours before exactly where they were at that time.
Because Android has to keep the whole application in memory, it quickly runs out (even with 512mb RAM) and then has to decide what application it will close. If switching between games (which often require >50mb each) then the memory manager will likely close game 1 as soon as I load game 2.
To add to this, with push notifications, applications don't really need to run all the time in the background (with regard to the example of MSN messenger above). The application can "freeze", allow push notifications to keep an eye out for incoming messages, then resume when I want to access it - perfect!
Of course, with the advent of 1gb phones (such as SGS II), perhaps there is an argument to be had for Android multitasking as there will be enough free memory to keep 10+ applications running at once. Who knows!
surrealjam said:
I have often heard this argument of "Android is true multitasking" vs "iPhone only freezes the current state of the app" and (even as a veteran Android user) I think iPhone's solution works better in practical terms.
Most of the time, with mobile computing, users switch between apps but don't really care if they are actually still "running" in the background or not - they just don't want to have to keep reloading applications from scratch everytime. For this, iOS is perfect as it almost seamlessly resumes an application the user last accessed several hours before exactly where they were at that time.
Because Android has to keep the whole application in memory, it quickly runs out (even with 512mb RAM) and then has to decide what application it will close. If switching between games (which often require >50mb each) then the memory manager will likely close game 1 as soon as I load game 2.
To add to this, with push notifications, applications don't really need to run all the time in the background (with regard to the example of MSN messenger above). The application can "freeze", allow push notifications to keep an eye out for incoming messages, then resume when I want to access it - perfect!
Of course, with the advent of 1gb phones (such as SGS II), perhaps there is an argument to be had for Android multitasking as there will be enough free memory to keep 10+ applications running at once. Who knows!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Never having used IOS can you tell me that if I am visiting friends and am talking to them in a call can I then pull up their contact details and use it to switch to navigation to get me there in the middle of which I get a SMS and read it without coming out of the call or losing my place in navigation?
Tehpriest said:
Never having used IOS can you tell me that if I am visiting friends and am talking to them in a call can I then pull up their contact details and use it to switch to navigation to get me there in the middle of which I get a SMS and read it without coming out of the call or losing my place in navigation?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
lolz.
But going back to the previous post about iphones being more practical, I do agree with this point. Most users of iphones are not really tech savvy and just want a phone that works. No tweaking no technical mumbo jumbo, this is where the iphone shines. This "freezing" and its ability to bring the app back to the user seamlessly does appear to more desireable than androids "true" multitasking.
Heres hoping that future generations of android phones really provide a good multitasking experience thats both functional and practical

Atrix's (or Android's?) memory handling behavior -- auto shutdown of apps etc.

Hi fellas,
Something's been peeving me lately with the Atrix, and it's got to do with its memory handling & auto-killing functionality.
This particular situation has been driving me nuts:
I like to use both the native browser & and the Opera browser. Primarily I use the native browser, which is set as the default, and Opera when I want to check something and I want the full (non mobile) webpage layout and its superior (in my opinion) rendering quality and speed.
So, say I've got Opera open on Engadget or XDA, one or two tabs open. I hit the Home button and open Youtube to look something up. Finish the video, hit the Home button again, and launch Opera, and it has exited already and has to reload my tabs again. This of course can cause issues like losing my place in the page or a flash video I had paused, or a message I was typing and wasn't done with.
In this simple example, all I did was launch a browser, open 2 tabs (40-60 or maybe even 80 MBs of RAM usage, depending on page complexity), hit the Home button, launch the YouTube player (30 to 50 MBs RAM usage), hit the Home button again and Opera's already been killed.
OS Monitor shows there's about 470 MBs of RAM free.
What gives? Checking the autokill settings it shows that the OS will kill empty processes when free RAM hits 82 MBs of free RAM (default settings, haven't messed with them)
This behavior doesn't happen only right after a fresh reboot. Once I've opened a few apps, google readers, twitter, facebook, camera/gallery, browser etc., it happens every time. I say this because, while I'm not a programmer (beyond high school level C++ and general computer curiosity), from what I understand by watching the app life cycle videos on Google's Android programmer site, if Opera and YouTube were the last apps to be launched, they should have the highest priority in being kept in memory and not being killed, and previously open apps should be killed off to reclaim memory before them.
I found that using Gemini app manager I can set an app to not be killed automatically, and while I understand that it's not recommended that this is done by end users, it does work, and I use the Exit button in Opera to exit it once I'm done using it.
It just seems ridiculous that I always have between 350-450 of free RAM available to the system, while apps that I use often end up being killed in the background.
Before someone jumps on me, I understand that Android apps are designed to be shut down and reopened seamlessly. My annoyance stems from the behavior of a phone that has 836 MBs of RAM to work with, and about 570 available on startup (I've frozen several motorola processes I don't use, such as the social network integration and home launcher).
I just tried what you did (open opera, loaded bbc and endgadget, watch a youtube video than returned to opera) and opera retained everything including webpage, where I have scrolled to etc. I would suggest you to unfreeze the moto apps and try again, maybe that is what is causing the problem. Sorry I could not be of greater help =(
I'm not disagreeing with you -- like I said, it's not the case after a fresh reboot, or perhaps when not using the phone heavily. It had been a couple of days since rebooting the phone for me, and kept happening all evening long every time I switched apps.
Still, even when I force keep Opera open through the Gemini third party app manager, and while opening other apps, the RAM usage never goes below 300. The OS is overly aggresively in keeping RAM free, and considering it never falls below 100 MBs free of RAM, it shouldn't be shutting down apps EVER -- at least according to the autokill levels. Is there something else I should be looking at in determining when Android kills apps open in the background?
Was it just a fluke due to memory leaks, etc?
Edit:
Further research shows that Gemini app manager doesn't stop it from being killed, but rather removes it from its own auto task kill list (which I don't use). Seeing Opera stay open for a while after a fresh reboot shows that after two or three days of being used, the phone's memory management gets bogged down & that's what caused the very short app lifespan.
I wouldn't mind rebooting more frequently if it wasn't for that damned battery jumping issue.

[Q] How can I manage background processes?

Basically, I went into Settings>Apps>Running and realised I don't want Facebook in there ever unless I actually open the app. I opened the Facebook app Settings and disabled Notifications off. Also Messenger Location Services is off too. Each time I try and kill the process or reboot it comes back.
Things that load that I want to permanently disable unless I actually open the specific app:
Facebook
Maps
Google Play Store
I use Titanium to put a widget on my screen where I can freeze and unfreeze that app. I have done it with maps and some other programs that were aggressive in their communications. Unfreeze them, open and use, refreeze when done.
Thanks grubbster.
Any other options available to me?
Other than ignoring it, you can kill the app each time you close it. There's a developmental setting that shuts down the apps (not sure if it's in Cyanogenmod only or just stock) because it doesn't keep anything in the background. This would close ANY app that's not holding forground view however.
I'll just leave it as it is to be honest. Just thought there was a quick way of doing it similar to how the MSCONFIG utility operates in Windows.
MSCONFIG does that for startup, there are apps that block apps from starting up in android too but those apps need to be running as well which defeats the whole purpose of having plenty of RAM in the first place..
The whole point is Android manages the background apps just fine. Having 2GB of RAM but wanting 1.6GB to be free all the time (200MB used by GPU AFAIK so you are left with 1.8GB) is not the smartest way to manage apps. You want them snappy, in and out and done. Apps sitting in memory doesn't use more power because the RAM is active even as long as it's plugged into the the motherboard.

Application manager quite slow?

Hi!
Is it just me or does it take quite a lot of time to load the apps and their info in the application manager?
Can't speak for others but on my N910C the list of downloaded applications appears within 1 second, and the list populates with the app sizes in about 5 or 6 seconds. I have 130 apps installed from the Play Store and about 20 or so from the Amazon app store.
EDIT: Maybe it's slower if you have lots of large games installed, or have moved a lot of apps to the SD Card?
I see. If I scroll down immediately after opening the app manager, it begins to stutter. I have also about 130 apps installed.
Yes, there is a slight stutter if you begin scrolling as soon as you open the list - however this only lasts for the few seconds it takes to get the app sizes. I was still able to scroll all the way to the bottom of the list despite the stutter along the way. The phone never actually freezes or stops responding in any way.
Thanks for sharing! So i guess, a little bit of stutter is quite normal.

Apps getting shut down

Is it me or is the app management still buggy? I had this problem on OP3 too [emoji848]
I was editing a video, when done I went to SoundCloud to download a music file. Then I went back to recents and the video app had to start again, making me lose the video I made [emoji849]
What is the use of 6, 8 or even 10 GB ram if the most recent app gets killed?
Very frustrating indeed
Yup, likewise. Particularly when the screen is off, background apps get quite aggressively killed. I've seen this for runtastic and cf.lumen.
I have the same problem.
Have you tried disability battery optimization feature?
I read few minutes ago that it can help and I'm going to try this.
You can also lock the app in the multitasking screen, using the 3 dots. I use it for Plus Beat to cover the missing led.
1. You can disable the battery optimization.
2. It may not be the phone but the app itself that is wonky. The reason I can say this is because I often times play a game and take a break to scroll through social media and reply to somethings and go back and the heavy game is still open. Part of that social media is youtube by the way.

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