CreepyD

I've looked on numerous occasions for this, as its extremely annoying, finally decided to ask about it.

Say I'm playing a game and need to go do something, I'll go into standby with the power button so the phone can be safely put in my pocket.

When I come back, that game may or may not be exactly where I left it (half way through a level say).
Sometimes I can go into standby for only 2 seconds, and it's already reset and reloads the app from scratch!
Other times I can leave it on standby for 30 mins or more and it comes back on exactly where I left it.

I want it to always carry on where I left it - is there any way of making it always do the latter? Maybe with a 3rd party app?

chanchan05

Depends on the game I think. Some games may not have permission for "keep phone awake", which means the phone goes into sleep mode and unloads the game.

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CreepyD

The thing is I'm using just 1 game as my example above.
That same game could let me put the phone on standby for only 2 secs or over sometimes 30 mins (although it's more often on the shorter end), so it's unfortunately not totally related to a particular game I would think.

If it's of any use I'm on a Galaxy S2 with 4.0.4

Unforgiven

It would depend on the game, what else is running on the phone, and if Android needs to free up memory for something else.

The game should determine on its own what to do when the phone enters sleep with regards to saving the state. If you leave the game to say go answer a text or phone call, that may activate other activities which could push the game off the stack of cached apps (again, up to the game to determine how to handle saving its state). If you turn off the screen and just leave it, it could be a background sync of say email, Fakebook or the device polling the network that could again, require Android to push the game into deep sleep. This last one would most likely explain why sometimes it can sleep for 2 seconds and others 30 minutes. In all cases, though, it is up to the developer of the game to determine how it will handle the device being put to sleep.

One final thought, though it doesn't sound like you are using one, it any task killer (or force closing through the system) would prevent the game from being able to take this step. Just another reason to avoid automatic task killers.

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CreepyD

That does make sense, so there's nothing I can really do about it.
I don't use a task killer since the one built in does a good enough job when I call upon it.