How to kill app and services on Android

When I got my new Droid X i was playing around with all the options it provides and what I could do with it. Since these phones run on operating system, I was looking for all the low level tools and options that I could tweak to make the perform better. Coming from a Windows OS I was of the mind set to kill all the services that I really do not need or kill the applications that may still be running in background because I started them a while ago. When you start using Droid phones, you have to realize that it is running on a Linux based OS that is little bit more intelligent in handling background tasks when it comes to allocating memory or consuming system resources. Once an application goes into background, OS takes care of lot of resource consumption issues for you. There is a little caveat to this as well. You depend on proficiency of developer(s) who wrote an application. A poorly written application can keep it running and consuming resources and drain your battery very quickly. So you need a means to kill or stop the rogue application or services. So how do you do it?

There are some applications like Advanced Task Killer (ATK), Task Manager etc. that provide you way to kill the application. But you really do not need these applications to do the job. Any application that tinkers with low level system APIs have to ensure that it is written not to be bottle neck itself by being buggy. I have heard some mixed reviews about these applications. And most important part is that whenever there is a change in underlying operating system, you will have to get an update for the application as well. And if there is no update available then this application may cause its own set of problems.

Android phones provide their own tools to access to running services and applications and way to stop them. Just follow these steps.

• Bring up menu on the phone
• Select Settings.
• From Settings screen, select Application item.
• From Application Settings screen, select Running Services.
• Now you will have complete list of running services on your phone. You will notice wording touch to stop at end of each services.

Well, you can see that phone provides its own mechanism of killing services that you want to.

Droid Does It!