Help Apps running at random...

[ashtro]

Ok so as of late my battery is def not getting the life it once had a few weeks ago...with lite use i could get avg. 30 hrs out of a charge....when im at home i use wifi cuz i dont get a good signal...now im down to about 14 hrs or so after a full charge with avg use mainly txt and sum facebook...but i noticed lately i use Advanced Task Killer and occasionally i will click it and certain apps are running that i never open ie: media hub, amazon mp3...thanks for reading and help...

 

[EarlyMon]

Android apps can launch by a mechanism called intent.

Simply stated, one app that you did use can create an intent that ends up with apps you don't care about auto-launching because of that.

In my case of that Amazon MP3 Store nonsense - nearest I can figure is that one day, I visited my Amazon profile on my browser, and after that, it auto-launched forever.

All of the social network or marketing apps are terribly efficient at creating and responding to intents.

Theoretically in Android, any unused app will simply go to sleep, not wake up unless you use it, and cost you zero battery use.

That's part of the case against using task killers.

In practice with Sprint bloatware, I can assure you that those apps do sleep as expected - but will wake themselves and phone home like clockwork and then re-sleep (you can see them do it in the system logs using a tool called aLogcat) - and that extra shuffling in and out and network or radio access is what's causing those apps to waste your battery life.

And that is the argument for task killers.

Advanced Task Killer used to have a poorer battery profile - it often used more resources (and therefore more battery life) than letting the crapware run. That was with an earlier version - so apologies to the dev if this has been fixed.

For what it's worth - check out replacing Advanced Task Killer with Advanced Task Cleaner Pro. When I was using 2.1, that helped a lot.

I've learned to hate task killers - but if you must try one - try another.

And you might consider looking at your system logs. If your bloatware is just launching and sleeping then there's no use to using a task killer.

But I'll betcha dollars to doughnuts that since this is a newer problem, something's gotten triggered by a social networking or marketing app.