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Multiple apps just showing up after Android 2.2 upgrade???

After getting the upgrade to my phone yesterday I have been finding that various apps have just been opening without my actually opening them. The major culprits seem to be: Pandora, FB, Skype, the HTC Music player, News/Weather, just to name a few. Now some of these apps are ones that I frequent, but before the upgrade I never noticed them being open without my actually finding the app in my list and activating it. Also, apps that I never use (ie Stocks and the various proprietary VZ stuff) will just be open for no particular reason. I use the Advanced Task Killer Free pretty frequently to help save battery life and for the last day and half I find that anytime I hit that button on my home page it's kill 6-8 apps, compared to before the upgrade, the 2-4 that I may have purposely opened at once. I can also hit the Kill App button and sure enough a minute to few minutes later those some applications I have just closed are opened again with no prompting by me.

I've tried to go through my applications settings and can't really find a permanent solution to the previously mentioned apps opening.

I love this phone and realized early on and through reviews that the battery life isn't the greatest and I try to be vigilant of what I close each time I use it. Now my battery is being zapped much faster than before. If anyone can help as I've tried to search through the 1st few pages of forums with none being the topic that I need, I would much appreciate it!

Thanks!!!

Comments

w40d1n1

A few geeky dweeb developers, in some dark and remote android cave, decided that they knew better than you how to best manage the battery life of your phone. Despite their vastly superior intelligence, they keep referring to the new froyo task management as an improved MEMORY management feature.

Just say Thank You, and get a iPhone when your VZ contract expires.

chucklenugget

Hi I just posted a solution to this as a new message but dont think I can link it so am putting it as a reply here too. Hope this helps. I definitely felt your pain with this issue!

After doing much on-line reading and research I discovered the culprit and the solution to aforementioned.

It took me awhile to get to the bottom of this and I am hoping to make it easier for others.

I found a post on erictric.com discussing the Facebook software and Wake lock as well as solutions to this rogue issue. Here is the explanation for the wake lock from geekfor.me this amazingly helpful information that explained a lot: http://geekfor.me/news/facebook-1-3-wakelock/

And here is the link to the dialogue on erictric.com: http://erictric.com/2010/08/05/android-2-2-froyo-battery-drainage-apparently-caused-by-facebook-app/comment-page-1/#comment-75122

I used these to piece together the following solution:

1. You do not need to uninstall the ATK. This is not the source of your problems.

In fact, I used it to indicate to me which apps were the source of my problems--the ones that were magically appearing as open or not shutting down even after I hit Kill Apps. For me this included Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Pandora, City ID, My Verizon, and the News and Weather. It disturbed me deeply that things were running that I had never opened.

If anything could be identified as wrong is that the ATK hasn't yet been updated to solve what I call the FB issue.

2. To solve this problem go to Settings and select Applications.

There you will find a list of all of the applications on your phone. First I uninstalled the current FB update as had been suggested and per the aforementioned explanation. I did this by going to Settings, Application and choosing FB where it gave me the option to uninstall the recent FB update. As the software itself is not removable.

After that, I uninstalled what I could from the apps that were going rogue: twitter, Pandora (I don't use it anyways) and the free dictionary program

3. If you cannot uninstall an update as it is not a choice (or do not want to) select Force Quit for rogue Apps.

Next(again still in Settings under the Applications selection) I went through all of the apps that just seemed to be running for no reason and selected Force Quit. This included Skype, City ID, My Verizon, News and Weather

4. SUCCESS!! I went back to ATK to then see what was running and guess what: only the apps I was using (or most recently had used)were listed. I tested this several times by opening various apps and going to ATK--there were no rogue apps (i.e. Skype or City ID) on the list and when I selected Kill apps --the apps were gone and did not appear again until I opened them.

5. You can still use FB and there are other apps out there for Twitter that work w/o this issue until this problem with the updates gets resolved.

Important Note: The solution as some people would like you to believe is not to uninstall ATK --all that does is prevent you from knowing what apps are going rogue and running down battery on your phone. Even w/o ATK installed, the apps themselves are still having a party in the background without you knowing as ATK is not what causes them to run. Just remember ignorance is not necessarily bliss in this case.

Furthermore, regardless of whether all of those apps run down battery life or not, I still do not want random apps open unless I select them to be running and I have found the solution to this that works well for now.

w40d1n1

The Force Quit trick only works until the next power-cycle....and getting good (non-choppy) audio on froyo seems to require quite a lot more battery-pulls. That said, the froyo eye-candy has improved. Yay! for GUI developers.<sigh>

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