[Cicatrize]

After using WM for so long, I've been accustomed to killing my running applications because they're all actively running and eating up RAM and battery life. Because of this, I thought I needed a task killer app for my Evo to make sure I was getting the most out of my device. After using it for the first few days, I decided to keep one of these programs (ATK) open and just "monitor" without killing any tasks.

I saw a nice surprise. Apps were automatically being handled by the Android OS by closing them. So, that's great, but what about the other "apps" that are still there and aren't going away? Well, there are two answers to this. The first is that as many of you may have heard, Android doesn't really have "apps", in the traditional sense of the word. They're all "activities" and can borrow other activities. So, if I develop an application that searches for restaurants in a certain area and need to show my users a map, I can call on the Google Maps activity to do so. It doesn't even have to be built into my app.

The other answer was shown to me after I uninstalled ATK an decided to install a program called ES Task Manager. This one shows you all the tasks running and what they actually are. It will show you if they are a service, background, foreground, visible, or empty. I assume empty is a status that consumes very little RAM and battery life, if any. Background appears to be apps that are in suspended status, therefore just held in the RAM but not consuming much battery life. The OS seems to kill these empty and background apps whenever it either needs the memory or they haven't been used in a long time.

So, I'm not telling you guys what to do, but I would suggest not using a task killer because one, it's not really needed, and two, you can cause some problems with apps trying to use the activity that you're killing.