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downloaded apps starting themselves!

user53

New Member
The biggest problem that I am having on the droid is the amount of apps that are loading themselves without me touching the phone. I am not talking about the os apps like google talk services or the ones that have widgets running. They are constantly wasting my resources and battery. For example, I ended all tasks and then started creating this thread. Now I checked them again and facebook (which I never opened a single time), music, camera, fml, imeem, last.fm, mototorch, music, pandora, slacker, and youtube are all running when I never opened them and do not have widgets going either.

Now I have read all the people saying it doesn't matter on android and the memory handles itself which one I don't believe because I can see a huge difference when playing a game and as it gets more noticeable I keep checking and more apps have started in the background. I end them and go back to the game and it runs smooth again. But even if this truly is the case I don't understand why this happens in the first place unless its only something with mine. I have seen all the threads about apps starting themselves but those only talked about calender and stuff like that which I understand since a lot of programs probly pull from that in the background. But nobody really seemed to say that downloaded apps kept doing it by themselves. So I thought maybe its just mine, my girlfriend has the eris and she doed not have this problem. I should also note I tried startup auditor, but it would not stop any of the purchased apps.

Other than this, I must say even coming from iphone, I love android and will never go back! Just want to know if other people are having this problem.
 
Review the permissions you've granted these applications, and my guess is that some of them were granted permission to "run in the background" or open themselves and check for updates from time to time.
 
Thanks for the reply! How do I check/change permissions? I've only looked in the settings menu for the apps I was having problems with.
 
It really depends on the application. Some apps do not release memory properly or are actually taking process cycles in the background. In those cases, yes, the potential is there for it to slow your system down. Others, in particular widgets (or so it seems), are more along the lines of (geez, I am going to date myself here) TSR programs (Terminate and Stay Resident) where they are "ready" to be used when called upon, but will not degrade performance.

Now, whether you want to believe that Android does handle memory "garbage collection" is up to you, there is little that I can say that will sway you, but anybody that has tried to run multiple applications one after another on WinMo actually knows what it is like when the OS doesn't manage memory properly... it is far more painful than your game running a little slow because something is eating cycles.

Also, any app on android that does "polling" (and again many if not all widget apps are guilty of this, but so are some others, such at Photoshop for Android) will restart itself when you end the process. This is the way the base OS system is designed. So, to answer your question, anybody that is running an app that "polls" for information on Android has this "problem"
 
My droid is doing the same thing and I doubt that apps like Car Locator and Camera are polling for anything.
 
same

i've got the same problem and i too seriously doubt that apps like contract killer, useless games, viber and so on have to run in the background for some reason, and yes, they slow my phone down. Contract killer is as far as i know one of the heaviest games for android and when i get under 100-90 mb free RAM its lagging, but when i close all the stupid useless runing apps with ATK or whatever my game runs smooth again. Question is just how to prevent apps u dont need all the time like games and stuff prevent from starting up after u've closed them.
 
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