Closing Applications ?????

[bhonora]

Hello,
I am trying to figure out how I can clear my active applications list or close applications. Because when I click the little window inside a window logo at the bottom of the screen i see a long list of things that are still active and open,,,,please help. Thanks in advance.

 

[Diskus]

In short, you need to keep on hitting the back button until it backs itself out to the home screen.

Long explanation:
1. If a program is doing something, then it will continue to run in the background.
2. If the program stops doing stuff and it is no longer in the foreground, Android keeps it in "hibernate" mode (in Windows terms). In other word, the system memory state of the program is dumped to storage memory.
3. When the program is loaded again, Android looks to see if there is an instance of that program hibernating. If so, it will load the hibernating instance; otherwise, a fresh new instance.
4. Android treats almost all applications as web pages, unless specifically told not to. What I mean is it keeps "browsing history" for each application so that when you hit "back," you would be returned to the previous state of the application, just as if you hit "back" in a browser.
5. Putting everything together, what this means is that if you simply hit the home button, you might not be erasing the history portion of the application. This over time will kill your system memory.

You can try this out by going into Google Talk, keep on starting and closing conversations with people on your list. After a while, try hitting the "back" button and see if Android brings you back to the list of the 4 chat clients. It won't. In fact, it will act as if you have not pressed anything. The reason is the previous state of Google Talk probably looks identical to the one you are navigating away from. Keep hitting the "back" button and you might see some interesting things, i.e. people who you know are offline would suddenly come online. You probably have to hit the button a dozen times before it finally exits you out. At this point, the memory dump for Google Talk is likely to be a lot smaller than if you hit the "home" button directly.

So you see, if you keep on using the "home" button, it won't take long before both your memory and your battery get depleted, not to mention at some point opening up a hibernating app would instantly cause your tablet to crash and reboot.

 

[Da5id]

Diskus – with all due respect, this may not be the most helpful answer for a person new to Android. I think that basically what he is asking is why is there no way to shut down a "program" as one regularly does one finished with a task in Windows. The short and sweet answer is, for the most part, Android takes care of this kind of memory management by itself. You may present a special case where Android fails to do this properly. Your example would be much like setting your Windows browser to open every search link in a new instance of the browser, searching for a super-busy memory intensive page such as MSN.com and then click on the link on the Google search page as fast as you can to your run out of system RAM. While it is possible to do this, it does not ordinarily happen. I think that at this point the original poster is looking for an explanation as to the differences between Windows and Android when it comes to closing programs.

Moreover, not all Android devices are implemented equally. My Lenovo K1 has an overlay on the home screen that includes is one of the three basic functions in the lower left-hand corner of the screen an icon that changes with the number of "apps" you have open. In short, when you have more than one tapping on the icon makes a vertical column of thumbnails appear allowing you to switch directly to any "open" app or close any one of them by directing your More specifically to a white X on a circular red background in the upper right-hand corner of each thumbnail. So, for example, in my case with my implementation of Android if I feel I am done with a nap I may close it, or not, and I usually only use the back button, which also appears as a swipe indentation on the middle of the right bezel in landscape mode and bottom in portrait mode when I want to go back within an app, but not to change apps. But otherwise, your explanation explains well how memory management works differently in Android.

– Gene
Lenovo K1 32 GB Honeycomb 3.2

 

[Tanzanite]

And then there is the lazy method: an application Manager.

I use Android Booster. This offers an easy way to see which applications are running and close them down.

It also has a number of other convenient functions, which you can read about here: : https://market.android.com/details?id=com.netqin.mobileguard&feature=apps_topselling_free