When you pick up your phone at lunch and see that the battery indicator is at about 40% when it was only a few hours ago fully charged, it can be subtly annoying. You haven’t been playing games or streaming videos. You haven’t really touched it. Nevertheless, apps are running somewhere inside that cozy little rectangle, gathering data, using memory, and doing whatever they do when no one is looking.
Android phones are multitasking devices. Most of the time, that is actually helpful. Your email refreshes before you even open it, your messaging apps remain connected, and your navigation app remains ready. However, the list of apps that are silently running in the background eventually ceases to be a feature and begins to feel more like a slow leak, which you can’t see by nightfall.
The solution isn’t difficult, but it does require a little more research than most people are willing to do. Navigate to Settings and select Apps. You can then choose any suspicious-looking app, whether it’s one you hardly use or one you downloaded months ago and completely forgot about. There is a Force Stop option once you’re in the app’s settings. The app is stopped when you tap it and confirm. It’s straightforward, instantaneous, and effective—that is, until you restart your phone, at which point anything programmed to start automatically will just continue where it left off.
The battery settings hidden in each app’s menu are important to understand for a longer-term fix. Allow background usage is a toggle on a Pixel device; if you turn it off, the app will no longer be able to run quietly in the background. Under Battery, Samsung Galaxy users can find a Restricted option that does essentially the same thing. The fact that neither choice is immediately apparent is likely the reason why so many people are unable to locate them.
Here, it’s difficult to ignore how different Android manufacturers are from one another. On one phone, it might take three taps; on another, it might take five. With settings that are at least logically arranged, Google’s own Pixel devices manage this more neatly than most. Even though Samsung’s interface has evolved over time, searching for a single item can still feel like meandering through a department store.
Android’s Developer Options provide a truly eye-opening view for those who are willing to go a little further. You can see exactly what’s active right now and how much RAM each process is using by navigating to Running Services once developer mode is enabled, which entails tapping the Build Number in your About Phone settings seven times. This sounds ridiculous, but it does work. You’ll recognize some of the names on that list. Others, such as some system services or apps installed by the manufacturer, will silently question why they are operating at all.
There isn’t really a single app at the heart of this larger problem. It has to do with accumulated weight. A single background app is insignificant. A dozen, each of which checks for notifications and refreshes data on its own schedule, begins to accumulate in ways that can be seen on your phone’s temperature and battery percentage. The worst offenders are typically poorly optimized apps from smaller developers; Google Play has improved screening, but many still get through.
Limiting background activity won’t make an old phone look brand-new. However, for the majority of users, doing this for even five or six of the most demanding apps results in a discernible difference—the kind you feel at the end of the day as opposed to just reading about in a spec sheet.
