Sunday, March 13, 2011

Android Task Killer - Best, Free, Automatic and Advanced App Killer

Android task killer is must to have app for your Android phone. It is good battery booster and improves performance of your phone by many folds. It automatically kills the tasks and apps when those are not running. This cleans up your phone memory and makes more room for active app. It works as an Android task manager for you which is constantly checking for unnecessary usage of your phone's valuable resources and release them. One of the best automatic task killer which is some times called as app killer is explained in this post.

This is seventh of the best apps for Android from the series of ten that I am covering here. You must have read and tried previous six apps that I described in the series. In case you are visiting this post directly and have not read about earlier six apps then too there is no need to worry, you can read about last six best apps for Android from blog archive. Today I am going to talk about one of the wonderful apps that will improve your Android phones battery life and will improve the performance of your phone. Today's best app for Android is Advanced Task Killer.

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Advanced Task Killer : You must have seen that most of the application that you launch on Android phone remain alive even if you move out of them. There is no exit menu or button for most of the apps. These apps staying in memory of the phone keep occupying the precious memory of your phone thereby slowing down the performance of your phone. Some of these apps try to use network connectivity, GPS and other hardware functions of your phone and that can drain the battery of your phone fast. One of the best solutions to all these problems is Advanced Task Killer (ATK).

Using this app is very easy. You have to just download it from Android Market, run it once, do the settings that you want and forget it. It keeps checking unwanted apps in memory and keeps killing it to free the memory and other precious resources of your phone. You can notice the significant improvement in performance of your phone and battery charge life. First time when you run this app you may see many other apps running in "Kill Selected Apps" list as shown in screenshot below.

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Advanced Task Killer in Action
As you can see there can be many apps staying in your phones memory and unnecessarily eating up the valuable resources of your phone, slowing down it drastically. You can kill manually some or all of these apps by selecting each one with the checkbox at right of each app name and then tapping "KILL selected apps" button at top of the screen. But this is not required because Advanced Task Killer app does this good job on its own. Even with its default setting if you come out of this app by pressing back button of your phone, it would conscientiously keep killing unwanted apps from your phone at predefined default time frequency.

Now move ahead to see what are the settings available to fine tune the behavior of this app. While you are still looking at list of apps to kill on the first screen of ATK, press the menu button of your Android phone and press settings menu. This would display settings screen.

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ATK Settings
Above screenshot shows some of the options available on this screen and there are few more which can be seen by scrolling the screen up, which you can see in next screenshot. Each of these options are described below:

Auto Start : This would launch the ATK automatically when you restart your Android phone. It is advisable to check this ON.

Show Notification : This would display the ATK icon in Notification Bar of your phone. This can help you confirm that ATK is running and taking care of your phone resources. It can also be used to quickly launch the first screen of ATK.

Set Item Height : This allows you to set the height of items displayed in the apps list.

Ignore List : This is very useful feature. If you want some of your applications to stay alive, for example 'Alarm Clock' then add those to ignore list using this setting.

Default Click Action : This setting allows you to set the behavior of ATK when you tap the items in apps to kill list.

We need to scroll down to see the remaining settings of ATK and are displayed in screenshot below.

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More ATK Settings
Default Long Press Action : Like 'Default Click Action' setting, this setting allows you to set the behavior of ATK when you long press the items in apps to kill list.

Auto Kill Level : Using this setting you can disable auto kill or choose from various auto kill levels.

Auto Kill Frequency : This setting allows you to set the time frequency or 'When Screen Off' to indicate when ATK should kill the unwanted apps. If you choose 'When Screen Off' option then you need to restart ATK to make those settings effective. To restart ATK goto its first screen and kill itself by selecting Checkbox at right of ATK item and tapping "KILL selected apps" button. Then run it again.

Security Level : Setting this level low puts more apps to KILL list and keeping it high puts less apps to KILL list but avoids accidentally killing some required apps.

You may like to watch the video given below to understand more about how to use Advanced Task Killer to improve the performance of your phone.


Given said all this, there is debate whether Android phone users should use applications like ATK to boost their phone performance. Some experts believe that using this kind of app can do more harm than help because Android system itself is very smart to know which app should be killed. Android does not kill apps because by keeping them dormant apps takes less or no resources and when launched they start faster. I personally have seen it improved performance of my phone and I am using it. I leave it up to readers if they find this app useful and want to use it and if it is giving them performance benefits at all.

So that was seventh of best apps for Android from this series of ten best apps. You can download ATK from Android Market for free and start boosting performance of your Android phone with minimum effort. Next time I would bring to you eighth of the best apps for Android, so keep tuned in and keep reading. Till then bye, take care and enjoy.

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