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I've found that certain apps (Amazon MP3 and Stocks, for example) will occasionally be running in the background even when I've never once opened them. Why is this? This is not desirable - those CPU cycles are mine, not theirs!

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Do you have widgets for these apps on the home screen? Could be as simple as that. – GAThrawn Sep 24 '10 at 14:14

5 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

Those apps come with the phone and can't be turned off or removed unless you root. Blame your carrier. There's really nothing you can do about it non-rooted. I feel your pain.

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up vote 1 down vote

This goes with another post I made about a slightly different issue.

Background apps usually just respond to events. Events they care about, which is usually nothing for these sprint apps.

They take up RAM. HOWEVER unlike a desktop, when android wants ram it will remove anything in the "background" that it wants (older first) to free up space.\

The only exception to ram freeing up is when it sends notifications (a permanent icon in the notification bar... like a downloading icon from the market while the item is downloading).

So don't worry so much about it. These bloatware apps don't harm your android unless they do anything because batter is a big concern. Careful with facebook/twitter as they ping the service every few seconds, you can disable the "pinging" by just disabling the behavior, they won't do anything then. Even the messenger app might get removed from memory, when the system does a background synch it wakes up, loads, runs, and goes back to inactive.

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Pretty good explanation. But a desktop system, at least all major ones, will take inactive applications, or even parts of applications, out of RAM and page them out to disk. – colithium Sep 28 '10 at 7:33
Yes, and no. In a regular OS your programs should not be taken out of ram and onto swap unless memory is an issue. However on the desktop these apps can take up small chips of your cpu. And taking up CPU means swapping if they are on disk. And the swapping is what kills you more than the cpu usage. Sometimes bloatware is written badly and just kills your computer, but thats different stories. I remember spending 3 hrs removing bloatware from a new Acer. Not because it was hard to find, but there was so much of it. – Dmitriy Likhten Oct 2 '10 at 4:50
up vote 0 down vote

Most of my background is with iPhone, and there are certain launch daemons that run when the phone starts up. Sounds like this is the case here too. Dennis from this post says

The only thing I know of, like I point out, requires rooting the phone and voiding the warranty. Go to /etc/rcx.d and remove the associated file with the executable. (This, of course, assumes that the filesystem follows the same hierarchy as every other Linux distro I have run.)

Hope this helps!
Thomas

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up vote 0 down vote

This does not answer the question, but you could root your phone and disable the autostart with autostarts, or just remove them with Titanium Backup

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up vote -1 down vote

Before rooting your phone, a not-so-easy operation, you should have a try to disable the auto launch when the phone restart.

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It's not possible with the baked in carrier apps. – colithium Sep 28 '10 at 7:34
1  
Fuck*ng bloatware :/ – Rob Sep 28 '10 at 7:37

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