Do android apps run in the background

How to stop Android apps running in the background

Having your battery drain faster than expected is one of the biggest headaches with any Android phone. Tracking down a charger and plugging in shortly after a full charge overnight is always a sad feeling. If you’re ready to thwart your battery woes, a simple culprit may be to blame. Here’s what you need to know to conquer background apps.

These apps can sap your battery and precious resources, but there may be a few different causes for your problems. Some apps might not be well optimized, some might be malware, or some might have a bug. All you need now is a little know-how, and we’ll have you living the charged life shortly.

Ready for a little extra juice at no cost? Let’s get into the best battery improvements.

Update your device! Get to Android 10 or better if you can

Many phones are still running on Android 10 even though Android 11 has been out for a while. Luckily, that’s good news for users. Android 10 has great power management features that place limits on background apps and therefore extend your phone’s battery life. One of them is called Adaptive Battery, which uses machine learning to figure out which apps you’ll use in the next few hours and which ones you won’t use until later, if at all today. Based on your usage patterns, it places each app into one of the five App Standby Buckets: Active, Working set, Frequent, Rare, and Never. Each of these buckets has its limitations for how much resources the apps it contains can use.

To put it simply, an app placed in the Never bucket is hardly ever used, which is why the system will limit its access to resources like the CPU. This means it will use less battery. On the other hand, apps in buckets like Active are the ones you use the most and will get full access to the system’s resources, so you can expect to get all your notifications on time.

The process is automatic and dynamic, which means the system learns your usage pattern over time and moves the apps from one bucket to the other accordingly.

Check what’s draining your phone

Battery

Since battery life is so important, it’s well monitored by your Android OS. To look at the apps guzzling power, go to Settings > Battery > Battery Usage. You’ll get a list accurate to two decimal points of what’s draining your battery. Depending on your device and software, the apps will be split into either system or non-system apps or by hardware and software to make things even easier.

The more you use certain apps, the higher on the list they’ll sit. Look out for any apps you don’t recognize using more than a tiny percentage of your battery. Any app using over a few percent is worth looking into — saving five percent here or four percent there will add up. Anything that’s a Google app or service is probably not something to worry about and just a natural part of Android and Google Mobile Services.

Using Developer options, you can also check out which apps dominate your phone’s limited memory, also known as RAM. It may be that an app is not using a lot of battery, but when you’re only working with 2GB of RAM and an app you’re not using is taking up a few hundred MB, leaving you short on available memory.

You can check this out in a few different ways, but here’s the sure-fire winner that works in new Android versions:

• Go to Settings >System > About phone.
• Scroll down and find “Build number” and then tap it seven times. This will enable “Developer options” on your device, and you’ll see a notification that this has happened.

Now go back to Settings > System, and you’ll be able to select “Developer options” from there.

Then go Settings > Developer Options > Processes (or Settings > System > Developer Options > Running services.)

Here you can view which processes are running, your used and available RAM, and which apps are using it up. Again, some of these services are essential to keep your phone running. You should be primarily looking for demanding apps you’ve downloaded personally.

If this method doesn’t work to unlock developer options, a quick Google search of your phone model and “developer options unlock” should help.

Stop the app, kill it, or uninstall your background apps

Once you’ve found your culprit, you have to know what to do next. Luckily, you have a few options to choose from if you don’t want to remove the app entirely.

Find the app in Developer Options and stop it

The first involves the Developer Options > Running services method we described above.

Find the background app, Force Stop or Uninstall

Once you’ve identified your background apps, it might be worth checking out all the apps you have installed and giving them a once over.

Go to Settings > Apps & Notifications > Apps.

You’ll see your apps load in alphabetical order, and from here, you can click into any app and decide to Force Stop or Uninstall it. As with before, Force Stop might cause a crash, but you’ll be OK following a reboot.

Limit problematic background apps

If you want to keep using an app that appears to have high demand, you might be able to limit what it can do.

Some Samsung and Huawei phones include OS options to manage background apps. In Battery Settings, Huawei offers an “App launch” option, which allows you to identify specific apps, restrict launches, and target power-saving measures. Samsung also offers a power-saving option to help manage apps.

If you don’t have access to a proprietary built-in option, there are, of course, good apps to help. The perennial favorite is Greenify, which offers fine controls over apps and places them in hibernation. If you have a rooted phone, you’ll have even more control, but it works well with standard devices too.

One problem with apps like this is intentionally introducing another app to monitor your device. In our popular post titled 13 tricks and hacks to speed up Android, our own Adam Sinicki noted that while background apps can kill the battery, background app killers can slow you down as well:

What next?

Android 11 is landing for most people, and we expect Google to continue upgrading Android’s ability to quash any apps that make your life harder. We’ll probably hear more as the update hits even more devices, and Android 12, which is currently in beta, should offer improvements in the future as well.

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How to stop apps from running in the background on Android

Android smartphones have gotten very powerful over the years and are great at multitasking. Over time, however, you might have seen smartphones degrade in performance and become sluggish. You may also notice that the battery life is also adversely affected. What if we tell you that on most phones, these issues can be fixed by simply optimizing the background apps? Read on to find out how!

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Why stop background apps on Android?

For those of you who chanced upon this article without actually facing an issue with their phone, you might wonder why would someone even consider to stop background apps. Here’s an explanation.

As you keep using your Android phone, you tend to install several apps on your device. Over time, chances become high that at least some of them aren’t well optimized for your phone or may have a bug. Some of these apps may even contain malware – especially the ones you did not download from trusted sources.

Oftentimes, these apps may keep running in the background even after you thought you closed them. The result is sluggish performance and a marked reduction in battery life. Let us now check out the various steps that can be taken to solve this problem and stop background apps on Android.

Update your phone to the newest Android version

In case you have a relatively old phone with you, the simplest way to stop apps from running in the background is to make sure your phone runs the latest version of Android. Starting Android 10, Google has introduced several power management features that prevent errant apps from consuming too much power or hogging too much power.

Android 11 is the latest stable version of Android and provide great battery optimization tools/ © Mr.Mikla / Shutterstock.com

If you are on a newer version of Android (the latest stable version is Android 11) you are already doing pretty good as Google has enhanced power management features even further. On phones running Android 10 and 11, it would be a good idea to turn on a feature called Adaptive Battery. On phones running stock Android, you can enable Adaptive Battery by going into Settings -> Battery -> Adaptive preferences.

Apart from optimizing errant apps, the Adaptive battery mode also optimizes the charging speed of your phone to ensure that your battery lasts a long time.

Analyze battery consumption statistics

There is no denying that Android offers a comprehensive battery statistics tool where you can see what apps are draining the battery the most. To access the battery stats page tap on Settings -> Battery ->View battery usage.

The phone will now open a page with the list of apps that are consuming power. What is helpful about this page is that it lists these apps in an order — with the ones consuming the most power placed at the top. Chances are high you will see some of your most used apps high up in the list. However, if you note some third party apps that you know you haven’t used for a long time in this list, it might be a good idea to either force stop or uninstall it.

The Battery stats page is a veritable goldmine of information/ © NextPit

To force stop or uninstall an app, tap on the app and and you will see a page with both these options. Note that you may also see some apps here that are part of Android and Google Mobile Services. You can ideally leave them be since they are essential for the smooth and stable functioning of your phone.

Control your background processes

Incase you are not too happy with the results of disabling apps listed within the battery stats menu, it’s time to try out slightly advanced steps. The best way to gain control of your processes is to have a dig around under the hood using the monitoring tools built into Android.

In some cases, before you can start, you need to enable developer options.

1. In most versions of Android, this involves going to Settings > About phone and then tapping Build number about seven or so times. You’ll get a notification telling you that Developer options have been unlocked once you’re done.
2. For many handsets, the next thing you need to look for is a setting called Processes, Process Stats, or Running services. You can find this in Settings > System > Advanced> Developer options > Running services. That option takes you to a list of running processes showing how much RAM each is using.
3. Obviously, it’ll be tempting to stop the most RAM-hungry apps from running in the background, but you’ll want to pay some attention to what you’re stopping before you go ahead. Stopping some apps might crash your phone.
4. You can also tap the settings option when in the Services/Processes menu to switch between running processes and cached processes.

Control Android services from within Developer options / © NextPit

I’m in! But I don’t know which apps to stop

OK. If you don’t want your app/phone to crash, err on the side of caution and use some common sense. The app marked ‘Google Services‘, or pretty much any app that starts with ‘Google’ shouldn’t be manually stopped.

On the other hand, if you look through the list and see messengers and music players idly draining your battery in the background, then you can go ahead and stop them in relative safety. Truly crucial apps usually won’t allow you to force stop them anyway.

1. To stop an app manually via the processes list, head to Settings > Developer Options > Processes (or Running Services) and click the Stop button. Voila!
2. To Force Stop or Uninstall an app manually via the Applications list, head to Settings > Apps > All Apps and select the app you want to modify.
3. Don’t delete any apps that appear when you select the Show System Apps option. You can see system apps by tapping on the three dots on the top right corner.

Apps that you rarely use are better off uninstalled altogether. / © NextPit

Task killers and RAM optimizers: the great debate

With Android software and hardware improving over time, some people will argue that the use of task killer apps is going to do more harm than good in terms of processing and battery life. As one of the problems you’re trying to fix is apps running in the background draining your resources, adding another one that has the purpose of doing explicitly that (it needs to monitor the services in use on your phone, therefore always needs to be running) seems a bit counter-intuitive.

A task killer that repeatedly force-closes an app in the background over and over is almost certainly going to drain your battery more as it continues the ‘restart and kill’ process. You might be better off not installing the task killer in the first place and just letting it run.

So there you have it! We have discussed several ways in which you can can stop background apps from running on Android devices. We hope the steps mentioned here proved helpful for you. In case you know if any other cooler methods that we might have missed out, share them with us in the comments below!

This article was comprehensively updated in July 2021. Older comments have been retained.

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