Why you need a Task Killer on Android…

There has been a lot of blog posts of late on the topic of why you
don’t need a task killer on Android, that the way apps are handled and
placed in the background… and how Android will eventually stop
processes that are not in use.

Here is my spin on why you DO need a task killer on Android:

Because Android app developers aren’t perfect. In a perfect world the
theory would pan out and developers would make apps that run friendly
with the OS and don’t break the rules. They would develop Apps that
don’t run pointless processes and, above all, they would be competent.
The problem is that many aren’t. Some are actually malicious.

I’ve had a few apps that turned out to be dodgy. I removed them
eventually. I have a few that are decent enough in many repects but
have their quirks. One, sadly, is one of my favourite and most used;
Subsonic. I’m still waiting for the bugs to be fixed and a new version
released, but until then I occasionally need to go in an kill this
apps to stop it continuing to try to download songs from the server
after I’ve stopped listening to it. Currently it just sits in the
background continuing to cache the tracks you were listening to when
you back out of the app. If I’m in a poor signal area it’s going to be
doing this for hours, not only using up my bandwidth but submitting
the same track to Last.fm each and every time it trys to download the
track. The only was I can stop this is to stop the app. Going into the
Application Management and forcing it to stop is enough but using a
Task Manager or killer is probably a lot easier.

For my tuppence; yes, people are too quick to kill running apps on a
Task Manager. It is, 95% of the time, unnecessary. But 5% of the time
you might have a rogue app that needs taking out.

This is why you DO need a task killer on Android.

Something to say?