Motorola Cliq (Android)

Android has a great edge over iPhone with its multitasking capability. But this feature sometimes becomes a bottleneck because there’s no proper way to completely shut down or quit an app. When you press and hold the home button, you see the home screen. It seems that all the apps have been closed but in reality they are not. They keep on running in the background.  This causes your android phone to slow down, consume more battery power and to heat up. Motorola Droid reportedly heated up to 90 degree Fahrenheit with only 6 apps running in the background.

Find Out Which Apps are Running in the Background:

1) Go to “Settings”
2) Tap “Applications”
3) Go to “Manage Applications”

Here you can find out which apps are running right now. You will find that many apps are running which you thought you had closed.You can force stop an unwanted app here but I won’t recommend that.

Nicely Shut Down the Unwanted Android Apps:

Taskiller

You need to close all the unwanted apps running in the background to free the memory and CPU resources being consumed and thus speed up as well as increase the battery life of your Android phone. The best way to manage and close unwanted apps is to do it with the help of ‘Taskiller‘, an app available at the Android Market. Its a free app and does its job pretty well. All the running apps are listed on app’s dashboard with their resource consumption details in the form of a color coded list.

White: Application is present in the phone memory but is not consuming CPU.
Grey: Background service
Yellow: Application is present in the memory and is consuming the CPU as well.

You can close an app with a single tap or other wise tap and hold to see a menu with a couple of options. One of the options is to add the app to the ignore list. The apps added to the ignore list won’t appear in the list of running apps.

You can also place a widget of ‘Taskiller’ on the home screen which will provide you with a summary of the running apps. A single tap on the widget will close all the running apps except the ones in the ignore list.

Don’t forget to add ‘Touchflo‘ and ‘Touch Input‘ to the ignore list because closing them will cause your phone screen to go black and the Android OS will restart. You may also like to add a few more apps to the list so that they are not closed every time you tap the ‘Taskiller’ widget. There’s no need to add ‘Android Subsystem‘, ‘Phone‘ and ‘Dialer‘ to the ignore list because they are there by default.