A simple search on the Play Store for battery-saving or speed-boosting apps reveals an endless list of apps with each of them getting around 10 thousand to even a whopping 500 million downloads. But are those apps actually useful?
The principle they work on
All these battery-saving and speed-boosting apps have one thing in common: the principle with which they work. They kill all the running tasks in memory. This, in theory, means that your phone will save battery by not running those tasks in the background.
Sounds good right? Not quite.
Why your phone’s better off on its own
Your phone’s operating system can handle apps running in the background on its own. Operating systems are designed and made to do this. Moreover, keeping apps open in the background is more power efficient rather than removing it from memory.
If you think about it, it’s more efficient to keep apps open in the background because every time it is removed from memory, and then opened again, the CPU has to do more work to start the app again (thus increasing power consumption) and load it back into memory. If it wasn’t removed from memory, the CPU could just start off from where it was last closed. This reduces any unnecessary power draw.
You may argue that when an app is open in the background, it utilizes the CPU to run its background tasks. This is true to a certain extent. Apps like messaging services have to run in the background. As soon as a message is sent to you, it has to update itself. These apps are made power-efficient to run in the background. So letting them remain open in the background will save more battery than starting them from scratch.
Moreover, after removing the background tasks, the apps themselves stay open in the background and consume battery themselves by monitoring the memory for “unnecessary” apps, just like parasites.
If that wasn’t enough, they install system overlays which slow your device down even more. They put their widgets in the notification center and remain running in the background putting more load on the CPU thereby reducing any power savings (which they didn’t even do in the first place).
For the same reasons, swiping the apps off in the recents menu can also reduce battery life.
Conclusion
Apps like these are just efforts by developers to easily earn money by fooling the users. So to conclude, those apps are absolutely unnecessary. When the operating system detects that the app is using too much memory, it automatically kills it for you.
What do you think? Are you using a battery-saving app? Let us know in the comments below!
Featured-image: Phandroid
