Android 14 will kill “task killer” apps that claim to make your phone feel faster
We’re sure that many of you have seen ads or come across apps that claim to make your phone feel faster, also known as “task killer” apps. While these apps aren’t exactly lying, basically what it does is it kills the processes of apps running in the background, which does give a temporary boost in perceived speed.
Unfortunately, these apps more often do harm than good, and it seems that come Android 14, Google is making some changes that will render a lot of these so-called “task killer” apps useless, as noted by Esper’s Mishaal Rahman. What Google is doing is that they will be restricting access to one of the APIs that these “task killer” apps use. According to Google’s explanation:
“Android is designed to keep cached apps in the background and kill them automatically when the system needs memory. If your app kills other apps unnecessarily, it can reduce system performance and increase battery consumption by requiring full restarts of those apps later, which takes significantly more resources than resuming an existing cached app.”
While killing the process of apps, like we said, it does give the phone a temporary boost in speed, but the negative effects usually outweigh the short-term benefits, so in reality, these apps don’t necessarily do that much for the user.
That being said, it might be a while before we see these “task killer” apps fade out from the Play Store since these changes are only applied to Android 14 which hasn’t been released yet, and even then it could be a long time before the majority of phones are upgraded to the latest version.
Source: Esper