Android Apps - why no close or exit button?

One thing I've still yet to figure out is why almost no Android apps have a native ability to close or exit the app.

In fact the only App that I know of that has an exit button is Google Navigation, which gives you the option to "Exit navigation" once you've reached your destination.

But every other app either stays open indefinitely after I use it once, or even starts automatically with my phone once it is installed. Like for example, I used the Bank of America app to check my balance yesterday for all of about 90 seconds. Today I see that the process is still running and has been now for over 24 hours. Why does the app need to keep running in the background after it's served it's purpose?

This is proving to be a huge disincentive to have apps installed that I only seldom use - because it's not worth it having to constantly force-quit an app that tries to run all the time when I only need it maybe once a week. It hurts my battery life and makes my phone feel sluggish after a while.

How do others deal with this situation? Is it intended behavior to have to force quit 85%+ of apps after I'm done with them or is there something I'm missing?

GotNoRice said:

This is proving to be a huge disincentive to have apps installed that I only seldom use - because it's not worth it having to constantly force-quit an app that tries to run all the time when I only need it maybe once a week. It hurts my battery life and makes my phone feel sluggish after a while.

How do others deal with this situation? Is it intended behavior to have to force quit 85%+ of apps after I'm done with them or is there something I'm missing?

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Something is very wrong with your setup if background apps hurt battery life and performance. Android OS is designed to allow background apps to continue running so its faster to initialize and reinstate them from RAM then off the flash storage. Background apps shouldn't have any noticeable impact on battery life or performance unless the app is very poorly written.

In fact, killing off background apps and requiring them to reinitialize cold from the flash storage will probably consume more power than letting the android OS manage them. Android will automatically suspend and garbage collect apps that are still running if the OS needs more resources.

Back button exits.

That said, Chris is right. I usually leave everything running, Android will kill it after a while anyways. As long as an app isn't using CPU, it shouldn't be draining battery.

Christopher said:

Android will automatically suspend and garbage collect apps that are still running if the OS needs more resources.

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How did you get it to do this? I've got a friend with an original Motorola Droid (only has 256mb of RAM) and as soon as you've opened a couple apps the phone slows to a crawl.

Android wont fix the problem itself, you have to open up a task manager and quite some apps manually to get it to be responsive again. Even tried installing Cyanogenmod, and it still has this problem.

Unknown-One said:

How did you get it to do this? I've got a friend with an original Motorola Droid (only has 256mb of RAM) and as soon as you've opened a couple apps the phone slows to a crawl.

Android wont fix the problem itself, you have to open up a task manager and quite some apps manually to get it to be responsive again. Even tried installing Cyanogenmod, and it still has this problem.

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I think that's more of a CPU issue than anything else (which is not what Andoid uses as its base to kill tasks).

I've never noticed a problem with battery life after I've used several apps.

no issues battery wise here, as stated android closes those apps after a time of non use, or it should....

Only app I've had an issue with going nuts is Google Maps. Doesn't close and eats battery in AOKP Build 28 and CM7.1, never saw that behavior with gmaps in stock Htc Sense.

It's more important to kill apps that use the gps as that eats battery, but, as has been stated a few times now: Android handles idle apps very well.

And the back button exits from most apps as well, as has also been stated.

Your poll is missing an option:

"I don't worry about it because Android manages it for me"

Don't force kill apps - that's *bad*. You shouldn't be doing that. Similarly, "running" simply means the app is still in RAM - the app doesn't even know it is still "running" because it isn't actually executing any code or doing anything, it is simply sitting there in a cache. This has zero impact on battery life - killing in app in that state doesn't do anything for you other than make it slower to launch the next time you use it.

Apps don't have close or exit buttons because close or exit buttons indicates the app is badly designed and broken. You don't need those buttons. Everything is handled automatically.

Unknown-One said:

How did you get it to do this? I've got a friend with an original Motorola Droid (only has 256mb of RAM) and as soon as you've opened a couple apps the phone slows to a crawl.

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The Droid isn't exactly a fast phone to begin with. But if Android runs low on RAM, it kills stuff to make room. It has since day 1.

Also, Android's garbage collection and resource management have gotten better with each release. So, older phones running older OS versions are more likely to end up bogged down than more modern ones.

You left off one option; i ignore the issue but still have great battery life. It is clear to me that when idle the phone has very good life (2+ days) though I can see how a couple of poor written apps coudl rapidly drain the battery dead. Also I tend to reboot the phone once a month so there is plenty of time for 'idle' apps to collect.

Zurginator said:

I think that's more of a CPU issue than anything else (which is not what Andoid uses as its base to kill tasks).

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One of the first things I did was overclock the CPU in the handset up to 950 MHz

That helps a lot, makes the phone a lot smoother... and then it runs out of RAM and just crawls along. Goes right back to being zippy as soon as there's some RAM to work with (after I manually kill some stuff running in the background). CPU usage doesn't seem to be the bottleneck, especially now that it's overclocked.

kllrnohj said:

The Droid isn't exactly a fast phone to begin with. But if Android runs low on RAM, it kills stuff to make room. It has since day 1.

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It's not doing it on this Droid no matter what I do (even after a fresh flash of Cyanogenmod).

It runs itself right into the ground, open a couple apps and task managers will report 0MB of free RAM remaining (the OS is paging to disk like crazy).

Unknown-One said:

One of the first things I did was overclock the CPU in the handset up to 950 MHz

That helps a lot, makes the phone a lot smoother... and then it runs out of RAM and just crawls along. Goes right back to being zippy as soon as there's some RAM to work with (after I manually kill some stuff running in the background). CPU usage doesn't seem to be the bottleneck, especially now that it's overclocked.

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As far as smoothness, heh ICS blows Gingerbread away without any need for an overclock. Currently running Deck's ICS on my old and underpowered (by recent standards) EVO 4G. Damn hardware acceleration works wonders. Even compared to other 3rd party ROMs ICS breathes life into old/slow hardware.

Skripka said:

As far as smoothness, heh ICS blows Gingerbread away without any need for an overclock. Currently running Deck's ICS on my old and underpowered (by recent standards) EVO 4G. Damn hardware acceleration works wonders. Even compared to other 3rd party ROMs ICS breathes life into old/slow hardware.

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Yeah, an ICS ROM is being worked on for the Motorola Droid, but last time I checked it still wasn't anywhere near usable yet.

I'll probably help him flash it to ICS if they get a more complete build out some time soon, see if it helps.

Skripka said:

As far as smoothness, heh ICS blows Gingerbread away without any need for an overclock. Currently running Deck's ICS on my old and underpowered (by recent standards) EVO 4G. Damn hardware acceleration works wonders. Even compared to other 3rd party ROMs ICS breathes life into old/slow hardware.

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Don't wanna thread crap but ... But Skripka, what ICS ROM r you running on your EVO?

MrkXCeL said:

Don't wanna thread crap but ... But Skripka, what ICS ROM r you running on your EVO?

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Deck's PB9. AOKP Build28 does not have HWA.