Android Phone Task Manager Functions

Android Smartphones For Dummies

If you want to get your hands dirty with some behind-the-scenes stuff on your Android phone, Task Manager is the app to open. It’s not for everyone. The Task Manager app is found on the App menu. It may not be found on your Android phone.

The Task Manager window shows all the phone’s currently running apps, along with trivial information about each one: The CPU item shows how much processor power the app is consuming, and the RAM item shows how much storage the app occupies.

You can use Task Manager to kill off tasks that are hogging up too much CPU time or memory or that simply bug the stuffing from your couch. You touch items you want to kill off and then touch the End Apps button. The apps are silently snuffed out.

A nifty feature in Task Manager is the Auto-End list. When apps have been assigned to this list, they automatically exit two minutes after the display times out. To add apps to the list, select them from the main screen and touch the Add to Auto-End button at the bottom of the screen.

There’s no need to kill off an app flagged as “not running.”
Task Manager doesn’t delete apps; it merely stops them from running. To delete an app, use the Android Market.
The Android operating system does an excellent job of managing apps. If resources are needed for another app, Android automatically closes any open apps as needed. There’s no need to futz with Task Manager, unless you just enjoy messing with such a thing.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.