Help How to stop Autostart applications in Android 7.0?

Gylenthal · Jun 3, 2018

Phone model: Motorola G5 Plus.
Android: Android 7.0
Android security patch level: April 1, 2018
Phone is NOT ROOTED

A lot of Applications are showing "Always running".
How can I remove the Autostart behavior of these applications WITHOUT rooting the phone?

EG.: FaceBook is always running and consuming a lot of Memory and Battery.
I want Facebook only to run when I need it.

steiny180 · Jun 4, 2018

Disable FB and any other resource hogs, if you can.

Settings -> Apps, etc. ...

Gylenthal · Jun 5, 2018

steiny180 said:
Disable FB and any other resource hogs, if you can.

Settings -> Apps, etc. ...

That solution could work for Facebook.
But the phone la loaded with a lot of Google programs that I never use and most probably never will use.
Yet, these programs are running continuously and they can not be disabled.

I saw on the Playstore a few programs who seems to do the task.
But they all require me to Root the phone.

Hadron · Jun 5, 2018

Yes, overriding the scheduling of apps by the OS (e.g. if the app tells the OS it should run on startup) requires root privileges.

Can you give us some examples of these unneeded apps that are running continuously and cannot be disabled, and what sort of course resources they are using? It's hard to judge whether there is a real problem without more information.

Gylenthal · Jun 5, 2018

Memory Usage:

Facebook: 216 MB
Google Play Services 169 MB
GBoard 100 MB
Google Play Store 51 MB
Google "Text to Speech" engine 41 MB
Google Translate 28 MB
Google (?) 21 MB
Chrome 13 MB
Etc....

Disabling Facebook and enable it when I need it is not a good solution.

Hadron · Jun 5, 2018

For Facebook you could try Facebook Lite, or one of the various "browser wrapper" apps like Tinfoil for Facebook. Any of those should use a lot less resources.

Memory is less of an issue than if these things were actively consuming cpu cycles (i.e. power). Android will always cache a lot of apps in memory: free RAM is still using power and doing nothing for you, while loading apps from storage is slower and takes more energy, so keeping the RAM occupied is more sensible than keeping it free (my RAM is about 3/4 full at the moment, and I'd actually be bothered if it was much less than that, not at all if it was a bit more). So really I worry about an app if it's figuring disproportionately in my power usage and not really otherwise.

Some of those things you can do nothing about, e.g. Google Play Services is a key Google framework process, and unless you remove all Google apps from your phone that is going to be there. Keyboards are definitely worth keeping cached in RAM, as they are used frequently. The TTS engine doesn't appear anywhere in my stats (which is fair, since I never use it. Maybe check your accessibility settings to see whether you've anything there you can turn off?).

The other question is, where do you get those statistics from? Some monitoring tools aren't very clear on the difference between app size in storage and size in RAM, or running services and inactive, cached apps. On my device right now, if I go into the developer options and look at running serivices then Facebook is only using 8.7MB for its service (listening for notifications), plus 114MB for the cached process. But the cached process is inactive, just cached to allow quick switching to it, and will be dumped if the system needs the RAM, so it's really only the 9MB service that's running. It's certainly a storage hog (it's currently using about 240MB for storing "user data" plus another 100MB of cache, in addition to a 184 MB app) but on my device it's not a big problem with RAM. But if you don't have that distinction between a cached app and a running service it would look like quite a big app is active and running.

Gylenthal · Jun 5, 2018

Hadron said:
For Facebook you could try Facebook Lite, or one of the various "browser wrapper" apps like Tinfoil for Facebook. Any of those should use a lot less resources.

I think that the best solution for Facebook would be to run it in a browser.
Just read Facebook and close the browser.

Memory is less of an issue than if these things were actively consuming cpu cycles (i.e. power). Android will always cache a lot of apps in memory: free RAM is still using power and doing nothing for you, while loading apps from storage is slower and takes more energy, so keeping the RAM occupied is more sensible than keeping it free (my RAM is about 3/4 full at the moment, and I'd actually be bothered if it was much less than that, not at all if it was a bit more). So really I worry about an app if it's figuring disproportionately in my power usage and not really otherwise.

I did not see it that way.
It makes sense.

Some of those things you can do nothing about, e.g. Google Play Services is a key Google framework process, and unless you remove all Google apps from your phone that is going to be there. Keyboards are definitely worth keeping cached in RAM, as they are used frequently. The TTS engine doesn't appear anywhere in my stats (which is fair, since I never use it. Maybe check your accessibility settings to see whether you've anything there you can turn off?).

I will look in the Accessibility settings.

The other question is, where do you get those statistics from? Some monitoring tools aren't very clear on the difference between app size in storage and size in RAM, or running services and inactive, cached apps. On my device right now, if I go into the developer options and look at running serivices then Facebook is only using 8.7MB for its service (listening for notifications), plus 114MB for the cached process. But the cached process is inactive, just cached to allow quick switching to it, and will be dumped if the system needs the RAM, so it's really only the 9MB service that's running. It's certainly a storage hog (it's currently using about 240MB for storing "user data" plus another 100MB of cache, in addition to a 184 MB app) but on my device it's not a big problem with RAM. But if you don't have that distinction between a cached app and a running service it would look like quite a big app is active and running.

I have plenty of free RAM and free storage.
I only want to cut out all these Applications that store lots of information without asking for it.
I receive every month an overview from Google, showing all the place I have visit, with every location of the map where I was at every moment, etc.
I never asked for that
The same with Facebook.

Gylenthal · Jun 5, 2018

Hadron · Jun 5, 2018

If you go into your Google account (probably easiest with a browser) there are settings to control what it records and delete data you don't want stored. Turning off "location history" will deal with one of the things you mention.

Facebook is a data collection app. Firefox on a computer has add-ons that isolate it and limit its ability to collect data outside your interactions with it. Don't know whether they are supported for mobile The "tinfoil" app I mentioned is a wrapper around a browser intended to do something similar.

mikedt · Jun 6, 2018

Gylenthal said:
I have plenty of free RAM and free storage.
I only want to cut out all these Applications that store lots of information without asking for it.
I receive every month an overview from Google, showing all the place I have visit, with every location of the map where I was at every moment, etc.
I never asked for that
The same with Facebook.

If you want FB to quit tracking you, I think stop using their app, and maybe use FB from your browser instead.

mikedt · Jun 6, 2018

Gylenthal said:
Memory Usage:

Facebook: 216 MB
Google Play Services 169 MB
GBoard 100 MB
Google Play Store 51 MB
Google "Text to Speech" engine 41 MB
Google Translate 28 MB
Google (?) 21 MB
Chrome 13 MB
Etc....

Disabling Facebook and enable it when I need it is not a good solution.

Do you actually use GBoard? And if so, do you want it to come up the instant you need to type something, or maybe having to wait for it to load instead? I know users have complained about lag, when the keyboard doesn't respond when they need to type something.

FB is there because it's monitoring and tracking you for their monetization, and for IM as well. Maybe use a browser instead for FB?

Do you need and use Google Translate?

chanchan05 · Jun 6, 2018

FB is supposed to run because apart from tracking, it needs to be running for the features like notifications and messages and stuff. So if you don't want it, disable it and use it from the browser, and not use the app anymore.

Help How to stop Autostart applications in Android 7.0?

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