Task Killer Apps Become Useless on Android 14

Within the early days of Android, process killer apps have been all the trend. Was your telephone being a gradual and janky piece of crap? That’s a simple repair, simply kill the entire ongoing duties and it ought to pace proper up, with the duty killer designed to release reminiscence and kill processes. It did the trick for about 5 minutes, then your telephone would sometimes return to its gradual habits. And no, task killers don’t help lengthen your Android telephone’s battery life.

As Android developed, with telephones being shipped with extra RAM, sooner chips, and improved multi-tasking capabilities on the OS stage, process killers haven’t been talked about as a lot, and beginning with Android 14, Google is trying to severely restrict the performance of apps that declare to make your telephone sooner by killing background duties.

Starting in Android 14, Google goes to limit entry to a sure API that has been utilized by these process killer apps to kill all background processes for a sure app. Utilizing this perform would certainly kill the duties, however just for the OS to must dedicate extra assets to the restarting of the app when wanted. Because the Android OS exists at this time, with its personal native process supervisor inbuilt, belief that the system is aware of what it wants and doesn’t must carry out as desired, without having for the person to become involved and drive chilly begins of processes that ought to have already been saved within the system’s reminiscence. It’s all types of Android/Linux magic that you simply or I layfolk don’t want to fret about.

In Android 14, if an app ought to name on this methodology, it would solely be capable to kill its personal background processes, not these of one other app. In keeping with Mishaal Rahman, this transformation was already current in Android 14 Developer Preview 1, however precise documentation for it reads as follows in DP2.

Apps shouldn’t use the killBackgroundProcesses API or in any other case try to affect the method lifecycle of different apps, even on older OS variations. Android is designed to maintain cached apps within the background and kill them routinely when the system wants reminiscence. In case your app kills different apps unnecessarily, it could scale back system efficiency and improve battery consumption by requiring full restarts of these apps later, which takes considerably extra assets than resuming an current cached app.

Different messaging to the builders of those apps reads like a discover/warning, however can be black and white, easy-to-digest fact for customers who proceed to make use of these kinds of apps. Google says, “It isn’t potential for a Third-party software to enhance the reminiscence, energy, or thermal habits of an Android machine. It is best to be sure that your app is compliant with Google Play’s coverage towards deceptive claims.”

This can be a constructive change and will assist the few customers on the market who nonetheless suppose they’ll pace up their telephone or enhance their battery life with the assistance of an app. Need higher battery life? Delete Facebook.

// esper