Help Stop programs from opening/running at start up?

[W4LLY]

I was reading one of these threads, and someone mentioned that there was a way to stop apps from opening on launch.

I have apps that randomly open by themselves and i want to prevent them from doing so. (VLC Remote, default messages, and a few others)

I've posted enough good points that if this was said already i can get a freebee

 

[W4LLY]

no one..?

 

[rolue]

I've been reading all over the place, that it's not necessary to do this on Android systems. When memory is needed for other apps, the system takes care of it self. They don't run like Windows systems.

 

[Needsdecaf]

Startup manager.

 

[onion]

I've been reading all over the place, that it's not necessary to do this on Android systems. When memory is needed for other apps, the system takes care of it self. They don't run like Windows systems.

Yes thats true...BUT the entire phone slows down to a craw when this happens. Everything runs very slow when you run low on memory (30mb or under) because the memory sub system gets overwhelmed and becomes a huge bottleneck which slows down the entire phone.

You DONT want to run down to 30mb or under and thats why the OP wants to prevent programs from starting on thier own.

 

[W4LLY]

sweet, once again love you guys.

 

[W4LLY]

Startup manager.

Do you mean Startup Auditor? Lo slike a cool program, will test run it.

 

[jeffyo]

Yes thats true...BUT the entire phone slows down to a craw when this happens. Everything runs very slow when you run low on memory (30mb or under) because the memory sub system gets overwhelmed and becomes a huge bottleneck which slows down the entire phone.

You DONT want to run down to 30mb or under and thats why the OP wants to prevent programs from starting on thier own.

I still don't understand how your phone gets that lag with the 30MB memory. Where else are others seeing that problem? Maybe on the Verizon site? I didn't see that as a known issue post back and let me know. I kinda want to know more about it and what is causing that. Your theory was the Android OS itself and how data was left in memory. I wonder if it's similar to paging like in Windows OS. Anyway post any Links of others seeing this.

Do you mean Startup Auditor? Lo slike a cool program, will test run it.

I tried this app and it did what it was suppose to but I was getting weird problems updating other apps in Market. They just hung and never went anywhere. The positive side is if it doesn't work for you you can always uninstall it within 48 hours for a refund.

 

[MechaNimaL]

I understand how awesome Google is, I am a one of their biggest fans.

Hence why I have an HTC packed with google awsomeness (oh and telstras dumbness )

But I dont blindly believe that Android is a 100% efficient OS like it apears some posters do in the forums Ive seen around.

This problem of bad resource management is in threads everywhere since the 1st & current ver of Android.

Ive read all the, Android only has snapshots of open programs saved & that memory is reserved for that purpose in the 1st place so it shouldnt make a difference ect blah blah.

Yeah thanx dude how does that help the poor guy with the problem?

But most of the ppl posting the "trust in android to handle it" mixed with tech talk on how it operates seem to be ignorantly blinded by there Google heart throb.

Dont get me wrong Google team. My heart throbs for thee. But I cant ignore the massive amount of ppl complaining about resource management.

I personally dont have slow performance on my HTC. Its lightning fast. (still a few days old tho)

But I cant go to far away from ac charger or im screwed. I unpluged it b4 going to work. I left it in my pocked all day. Only answered 1 call & had a few texts. Syncing disabled. GPS Disabled. Played a game for 10 minutes & Played with the wallpaper at lunch.

By the time I finished work (8.5hrs later) I was down to 26% battery.
What good is having a phone if I cant call anyone if I go out after work?
Do I have to carry the charger with me in my frekin pocket?
Ask the waiter or a bouncer at a club where is there a powerpoint I can use?

Should have got an iPhone

To end my rant.....

1. - Programs should be able to close without installing another app to do it. And dont tell me when its not on screen its only snapshot saved & isn't actually running. Ive had lots of apps still give me error messages from the background (this is what forced me to get a task manager to close app) & have left a web page half loaded & come back to find it fully loaded.

Android can multi-task. It's one of its awesome powers. So if programs cant be closed they are still running. Either way you try to heartthrob techno garble it. It still means less available resources & more cpu power chewing up the battery all because Google didn't ad a little X to appear on apps.

2. - Programs should only run when commanded by the user or if the user has added it's widget to homescreen. But NOT if they only added a shortcut homescreen. Shortcuts are just that. They dont need to run/pre-load the app & hide it. I look in my task manager & find all kinds of apps running. Right now the following is running....

People, gallery, maps, fm radio, news, stocks, google search, footprints (wtf is this any way), market, mail, music.

I turn my phone off & on then killed all running apps 5 minutes later with task manager. A few minutes after that they are all running again. I have syncing for these apps disabled.

Everything else Google made is smart & efficient. But I cant make a simple phone call if I am out of the house for too long. This aint no smartphone. Its a blody moron with a box of shiny tools.

And dont get me started on the facebook mobile number bug. (easily fixable & as irritating as sandpaper underpants)


Tsk Tsk Google. My heart is broken.


PS - A lot of slow phone threads iv read seem to solve it by freeing up space by deleting things they dont really need. You need enough free space for android to run fast. Not too much tho maybe 20 to 30mb.

 

[MechaNimaL]

PPS - Apologize for the long winded rant. It just gets my goat when some poor guy says. I have a problem is there a way I can do... & some tool says. Why would you wanna do that. Your problem doesn't really exist. You dont know anything.

 

[Podivin]

Didja notice that the thread was over a year old?

 

[Mizuno]

I have the same issues. Not so much the battery problem, but the apps running when I havent touched them. My issue is people who have nothing better to say other then mentioning that a thread is old. SO what?? Is it not better than starting another thread asking the same questions?? Would have people barking up over that too. How do you win..

And back the the point if this thread, how do we stop this starting of apps when they are not opened?? And if we are not to worry about them, why do they open in the first place?? I have some Celebrity thing that runs on mine and I cant even find an app that matches that description. And all this does slow my phone down. And if its cached, why are 21 apps chewing up 173mb of memory?? I would have thought that cached apps would use bare minimum memory and resources.

Its a great system, but I can do without the extra crap that seems to have a mind of its own.

Cheers
D

 

[blankzebra]

Please see Issue 14889 - android - Allow choosing the startup applications - Startup manager - Project Hosting on Google Code

 

[AndroidRooster]

I realize this is an old thread and very grateful to have found it. This app starting on it's own is crap! It should not be impossible to pick which apps you want to stat/leave running without rooting. I have added my * to issue 14889. It has been starred 216 times. I wish everyone would get on google's arse about this.

 

[W_A_Watson_II]

This garbage app loading is making my phone even worse these days, sure wish it was easier to control/stop.

 

[mikeami]

Now to a possible solution that has worked for me.

IF(!) your device is rooted, you can install 'Gemini App Manager'
(it's in the market place and free). This app allows you to
change the auto-run settings on any of the programs you have
installed. I do not know if it will work on applications
pre-installed by your carrier, but works well on my tablets
running Honeycomb.

 

[Armadillo7]

Ive noticed this with my phone. I kill tasks I never use and they restart themselves later on.
Any recommendations for task managers? There are alot of them.

 

[doogald]

Ive noticed this with my phone. I kill tasks I never use and they restart themselves later on.
Any recommendations for task managers? There are alot of them.

No, do not use them. They do not save battery. Leave the apps alone and they will be inactivated and not use CPU and use minimal RAM. If you close them, the will automatically open, making them active again for a little while, using CPU and more RAM.

 

[W_A_Watson_II]

No, do not use them. They do not save battery. Leave the apps alone and they will be inactivated and not use CPU and use minimal RAM. If you close them, the will automatically open, making them active again for a little while, using CPU and more RAM.

I can't say I believe that. Every time my phone is responding slowly, I kill them and the phone is fast and works great again. Sounds like it might be time to root and get rid of the bloat.

 

[doogald]

I can't say I believe that. Every time my phone is responding slowly, I kill them and the phone is fast and works great again. Sounds like it might be time to root and get rid of the bloat.

Fresh Rom – CDMA Android Development FAQ: Why You Shouldn’t Be Using a Task Killer with Android

So

 

[W_A_Watson_II]

I've read this stuff everywhere, but how do you explain:

• Apps that I've never used, aren't using loading and running?
• When the phone gets slow, sluggish and almost non-responsive, the only way to get it back to a decent operating phone is to kill those apps you don't use that are running?

I fully understand that the Unix base of Android and:

• Kills a task when more memory is needed.
• Automatically kill a task when it

 

[naenyc]

Admittedly, I haven't kept up on this much in recent years, but the reason many get so confused about this subject is that they confuse killing/swapping/paging.

Unix, from the beginning in the 70's and 80's used a demand paging method. What this means is that only what is necessary to run a program/process in read in from the disk. So if you had a 10M program but for some odd reason only 10K was necessary to execute the task, i.e. the working set, then that is all that will be in memory.

A process table entry is very small relative to the code. So a process can stay in memory and not really consume much RAM. The blackboard analogy isn't bad in illustrating one paging method, FiFO, first-in/first-out.
Or the oldest pages are sent to the bit-bucket first.

If it took up 1/4 of the board for a concept, but only 1/20 is necessary for the gist of it. Then most of the information can be erased without affecting the ability to understand the subject, likewise only 1/20 of a program would be necessary to run what you need. Restarting it may require 1/4 of RAM ... and a lot of extra work re-reading the pages.(Battery)

The bottom line is that a "sleeping" process does not consume the RAM you think, and if it does, they are simply overwritten with new pages. NO WORK is necessary to free up a page of RAM.

SWAPPING is a concept that is like this: Things are really bad here in the free RAM situation, let's move the entire process out to disk in one hunk.

KILLING: basically frees up all the pages of a process, however you really don't know how many are actually active

 

[W_A_Watson_II]

I'm not "closing/killing" apps for memory, I'm doing it to get the phone to not be so damn slow and non-responsive. If the phone was responsive and with out a growing lag, I'd never even bothered trying to kill the apps.

 

[naenyc]

Computers are slow because of LACK of RAM. Most processors are fast enough to get the job done. Take a 6 year old laptop, add a couple of sticks of RAM to give it 2Gig and it will run W7 just fine.

We used to say that memory was 3-4 orders of magnitude faster than disk.
That is, 1000 to 10000 time slower than Ram. With the SDcard, flash memory, being even slower, add another factor of ten and RAM is up to 100,000 faster. (Maybe the math if off, but you get the idea)

Every time you kill off a process that is required, it must be read in, VERY slowly, to get it going again.

I'm just surmising most of this, but they probably use some kind of "lazy" algorithm for restarting the killed apps. That means they will be re-launched at a fairly leisurely pace, so for a brief period, the apps you want to run have enough memory and the phone seems "snappy".

Over time, the RAM will become clogged with the auto-launched apps as the eternal fight for RAM continues. REMEMBER, the OS/Android doesn't know what apps are more important(if we ignore priorities).

The diagram for stopping processes seems not to be answering a fundamental question ... WHY? It's cool to kill off processes for the reasons listed, but if most of the pages are not in RAM, what is the real reason. Maybe it kills hung processes, or processes that it deems stale.

Others feel free to comment.

BOTTOM LINE:
Disk Thrashing

My guess is your phone is Disk Thrashing and spending all its efforts moving pages of disk into RAM.

SOLUTION:
Either DELETE apps or don't auto-launch them.

Purchase: Startup Manager
Free: Gemini


NOTE: A six year old computer with a SATA connector can outrun a new I3 with a magnetic disk if you give it:

RAM and
SSD (Solid State Drive)

Just illustrates how important I/O is, while most people focus on CPU.

 

[W_A_Watson_II]

SOLUTION:
Either DELETE apps or don't auto-launch them.

Delete the Apps, I can't with out rooting.
Don't auto-launch them, I'm not, auto or otherwise. How do you stop them, rooting is what I'm learning.

Solution: Root the phone and stop the crap from loading/running. Void the warranty and move on.

I'm a windows fan because I like to control this crap, that's why I never converted to Apple. I always thought Linux/Unix was one step better than windows, just never made the move.

Looks like It's time to root.