Vague task killers and RAM boosters don’t stand a chance in Android 14
The so-called task killers, cleaners and boosters in the Google Play Store have been around since the very beginning of Android. You use these apps when you want to free up some of your memory to give your phone a boost. What many people don’t know is that Android itself already has smart memory management, which makes these apps obsolete. Google is now going to make sure that these apps have a hard time in Android 14.
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Taskkillers, cleaners and boosters in the Android Market
Yes, they have been around for as long as the app store was still called Android Market. These apps promise you a faster smartphone. They usually do this by closing processes and cleaning up ‘unnecessary files’. They often have one thing in common: they use a lot of battery and are full, but really full of eye-catching advertisements.
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Google will tackle these apps in Android 14
In practice, these apps do more harm than good. Thankfully, in Android 14, Google is finally taking a stand against these sketchy apps. Affected apps use the KILL_BACKGROUND_PROCESSES permission to call a system function that causes all background apps on your phone to be stopped. In Android 14 this will no longer be possible. Android enthusiast Mishaal Rahman discovered this.
When an app in Android 14 calls this function, the app can only end its own background processes. Even if the app targets an older Android version and an app’s specific package name. So in Android 14, only a system app can be allowed to close an app other than itself.
As indicated, Android manages background processes automatically. If such a taskkiller force closes an app, it will simply be restarted. Eventually, that process slows down the phone again, as the background tasks performed by the closed app have to be restarted again. It’s great that Google wants to tackle this with Android 14. So we hope that this restriction will come in the stable version of Android 14.
The most popular articles about Android 14
You can discover more about Android 14 in the second developer preview (DP2) of Android 14 that Google just announced. It contains many new possibilities, including the return of the notification light.
