We can see various Task Killer apps that claim to improve your device’s performance and battery life by killing all the background process. But the bitter truth is task killers are actually bad for your devices and can reduce its performance and battery life.
Task Killers are Useless for Android
Lots of Android users assume it is like using Windows – kill the programs that are currently running to decrease load and increase performance. But Android doesn’t work like Windows and it definitely doesn’t manage processes like Windows! You cannot “close” apps or programs in Android like you do in Windows. However, this is not a defect of Android as it wasn’t made to do so. It has its own way of managing processes. In Android, after you leave an app to run another, it stays running or gets paused in the background using no or little CPU, RAM, Network or other resources. Most of the time the usage percentage is so low, you barely fell it running. If you’re downloading, or syncing then the usage percentage is a bit higher. This is done because if you need to go back to the app, you can continue where you left off because the app was running in the background. If you feel the running processes are consuming a lot of your resources then you can limit the number of processes that are allowed to run in the background. You can do this by going to Settings > Developer options > Background process limit.
Also read:
- How to Use the Face Unlock Feature in Lollipop
- How to set up Smart Lock and Trusted Devices in Android 5.0 Lollipop?
- How to Restore Softbricked Device after Updating to Lollipop
So why are task killers useless and bad for your device? I’ve explained previously why android keeps the apps running in the background. It stores apps in the RAM for quick access filling up the RAM. Most of the users have a common misconception – Free RAM is better. You are wrong! Free RAM is useless. Used RAM is useful as it is being put to work to caching up your apps and making the load time faster for your convenience. If Android needs more memory, it will simply kill an app that was sitting ideal automatically. There is no need of task killers as Android has its own task killer that operates automatically.
Task killers think they know Android but they don’t. They think they’ll increase its performance but they don’t. Task killers actually reduces Android’s performance by killing every app that is using your RAM waiting for you to open it up again. When the app gets killed, it’ll take more time to load and thus degrading your device’s performance. Also, loading the app again will use more battery than loading it up from RAM. Again, some apps are stubborn and run again immediately after a task killer kills it. The task killer will kill it again but the app will run again and thus using more resources.
There is another reason why task killers are useless. RAM will take the same amount of power whether it is full or empty. So a task killer will not improve your device’s battery. However a task killer is useful for one thing, killing the misbehaving app but this is a long shot – you may or may not fix the problem.
So next time you are browsing the Play Store and come across a “new” and “improved” task killer, just keep scrolling.
Sometimes killing an app is needed for privacy purposes.