Google launches campaign to crack down on ‘killer acceleration’ apps; have you downloaded any yet?
Are you an Android smartphone user? What do you do to speed up your phone? There are a number of third-party mobile apps that can be installed in your Android device to make it run fast. Notably, not all apps you install from the Google Play Store are safe. And now Google is planning to crack down on apps that claim to speed up your phone. “Third-party ‘speed-up’ apps can actually do more harm than good, which is why Google is preparing to crack down on them with changes in Android 14 and a warning for developers.” app developer on Google Play”, a Esper’s blog post mentioned.
Why you shouldn’t use accelerator apps
According to blog postMuch is said about the effectiveness of ‘task killer’ applications that claim to improve your computer’s performance. Android devices. However, such mobile applications should not be used. “That’s because the operating system already has its own built-in task management mechanisms, designed with the memory and power constraints of mobile devices in mind,” the post reads.
“Shutting down processes to free up memory without regard to their state or knowledge of how Android/Linux manages memory can actually negatively affect performance because the OS has to do more work (and therefore more CPU cycles) to perform cold-booting of the processes the user just killed.It is almost always better to let the operating system manage memory than to use it. third party “task killer”/”speed booster” app to kill processes, that’s why Google started restricting these processes application can do and prepare to limit how developers market them on Google Play,” the blog post adds.
It was further announced, “Starting with Android 14, one of the APIs commonly used by “task killer” apps will be restricted. In previous releases, apps had the KILL_BACKGROUND_PROCESSES permission (the “normal” permissions i.e. install time) can call ActivityManager.killBackgroundProcesses(String) to kill all background processes of a given application.This method does the equivalent of killing the kernel processes. process to reclaim memory, so that the operating system restarts those processes when needed.”
When apps call this method on devices running Android 14, regardless of the app’s target API level, they can just kill their own background processes. Passing the package name of any other application will not affect that application’s background processes and in fact the syslog will indicate that an invalid package name was sent.
