How to stop apps from running in the background in Android
mostly your Android phone’s battery drains faster than you expect. One of the main reasons for this could be the apps running in the background long after you moved on to a different task altogether. Here’s how to stop Android apps from running in the background.
Find the background app, Force Stop or Uninstall
Once you’ve identified your background apps it might be worth checking out all the apps you have installed and giving them a once over.
Go to Settings > Apps & Notifications > Apps.
You’ll see your apps load in alphabetical order, and from here you can click into any app and decide to Force Stop or Uninstall it. As with before, Force Stop might cause a crash, but you’ll be OK following a reboot.
Use a Third-Party App to Control Background Apps
If your Android device doesn’t have a proprietary native or built-in option to be optimized or checked on running in the background, you can use a third-party app to control such apps.
Greenify is one such app that provides fine controls over apps and manages them by placing them in hibernation. For non-rooted phones, the controls are limited, but with rooted phones, you have more control over the apps running in the background.
However, task-killers tend to slow your phone down and sometimes may drain your battery more as they try to force-close an app in the background every time.
Update your OS
Newer versions of Android, starting with Android 9.0 Pie, have superior power management features that automatically — via machine learning — limit the background operation of apps that could drain your battery or degrade performance. This Adaptive Battery feature intelligently determines which apps you’ll use sooner, later, or ever based on your past use and limits their use of system resources accordingly.
Find the app in Developer Options and stop it
The first involves the Developer Options > Running services method we described above.
device memory usage android
Notice how Messenger takes up RAM through three separate services. Tapping on any app and hitting Stop will stop it from running and free up your RAM. Be careful, if you stop any essential service just through testing or by mistake, you might crash your phone. It’ll just need a reboot, but it’s a little bit of a pain.
Make sure your apps don’t sleep in the background on Samsung phones
If you have a Samsung device running One UI, Samsung provides another way to control sleeping background apps. It’s somewhat easier to use, and can supersede (but also kind of duplicate) the OS-level battery optimization setting. If you do have a Samsung phone, make sure you’ve set this up as well as the above battery optimization setting to make sure an app doesn’t go to sleep. If you tell the Android OS not to optimize the battery life of an app, but not the Samsung settings, your phone may still put it to sleep.
You’re going to have to go deep to find these controls. Start the Settings app and tap “Device care.” Then tap “Battery.” On the Battery page, tap “App power management.”
Samsung maintains a list of apps that are never permitted to go to sleep. To see the list, tap “Apps that won’t be put to sleep.” You can add additional apps to this list by tapping “Add apps.”
Samsung’s App power management settings
To disable background apps from going to sleep at all, turn off “Put unused apps to sleep.”
Wrapping Up
In a perfect world, all app developers will be using the new API. Since we’re not existing in a perfect world, there will be apps that might continue to drain the battery on your Android device. If you find that happening, you now have the power at your fingertips to stop this unwanted activity.
