If you will have an Android cellular, you will have certainly seen a variety of apps within the Play Store to free up memory and enhance the efficiency of your cellphone. They are in all places and nearly all the time use phrases like “Speed” or “Booster” of their identify.
Here at Happy Android we now have been recommending avoiding most of these purposes since 2017 (at the very least so far as I bear in mind), in addition to different apps of doubtful effectiveness equivalent to “cleaning” apps or apps to save battery. In most circumstances they’re pure placebo, and they’re additionally stuffed with overflowing promoting.
Now Google has dominated on the matter, formally confirming that the apps for free up memory by stopping background processes they only do not work.
Android places a brake on apps to free up memory: they will solely kill their very own processes
The very first thing they’ve performed from the corporate has been restrict the usage of the API that permits stopping processes in Android 14in order that purposes can solely kill their very own processes, stopping some other third-party processes from being killed.
Therefore, as of Android 14, the apps to pace up the system and free up RAM will not give you the chance to shut different purposes that we now have open to supposedly “improve” the efficiency of the cellphone. Taking into consideration that that is the principle operate of this sort of instruments, evidently they’ve a relatively bleak future forward of them.
But that is not all, since in documentation of API changes for Android 14, Google has included the next textual content that leaves no room for doubt:
“Note: It is not possible for a third-party app to improve the memory, power, or thermal behavior of an Android device. You must ensure that your application complies with Google Play’s policy regarding misleading claims.”
So it is clear to Google: Android has been designed to handle assets as effectively as doable, and any app that claims it may well do higher is deceptive and might be faraway from the Play Store.
In truth, the corporate additionally clarifies that Android “stores apps in the cache in the background and automatically deletes them when the system needs memory.” And it provides, “If your app kills other apps unnecessarily, may reduce system performance and increase battery consumption by requiring hard restarts of those apps later on.”
It is evident that these apps to free up memory may have been helpful a few years in the past, when smartphones barely had 1GB of RAM and Android was nonetheless in its infancy. Currently they’ve continued to be current within the Play Store, however all the things signifies that their days are numbered.
