Close app programmatically android

Programmatically close all running apps via ADB

by Tomasz · Published 20th November 2017 · Updated 12th May 2020

It seems and is the most obvious choice to close apps running in background in order to give a device a small boost. Android’s recents screen is designed to allow users to quickly stop apps from running with a simple swipe gesture. But there has to be a way this can be achieved with a script? Given diversity of a designs for recents screen across multitude of manufactures, it would be almost impossible to come up with a solution to automate that gesture, instead there is more basic solution.

1. Close any package

First step is finding a way of closing/killing an app:

As it turns out, its rather simple – activity manager to the rescue. The only required parameter is the package name (e.g com.xanh.draftnotes).

2. Get the list of running apps

Now, we need to get a list of recently opened apps, which after a little bit of digging, turns out not to be as difficult as well:

This might not look like a final solution, however Window manager actually contains a list of currently opened apps (with some additions, that can be easily filtered). Let’s apply some grep to make it more usable.

This should result in following list:

The last step is loop those packages through am force-stop