Making Android system process killing smarter can be achieved without root

If you are an Android enthusiast, you may remember PingWest once mentioned the problem of how to make killing processes smarter. At that time, we only talked about the security industry trying to solve such a problem, but now the answer has been found.

If you are using a rooted Android phone, these problems may not bother you, because the security software on the market can basically effectively solve the problem of background program auto-start after obtaining root permissions. But for most Android users, they will not take the initiative to root their phones, and they don't even know what root is. In this case, how to solve the problem of making killing processes smarter?

Before giving the answer, in order to let readers understand how this function works, I will first explain the background characteristics of the Android system.

Ruan Long, senior product architect of Baidu Mobile Security Department, told PingWest that the main reason why users feel that Android phones run slowly and consume power quickly is that programs take up too much memory and CPU. The "programs" here can be divided into three parts: Activities with UI interfaces and user interactions, Services without UI interfaces but running in the background, and Receivers, a mechanism for receiving notifications from others.

When the user no longer interacts with the Activity, the Android system will automatically terminate the Activity if the RAM is insufficient, but the Service may still run in the background. At first, the one-click acceleration function in security software usually kills the Activity and Services, but the Receiver is still there.

Therefore, for security software, as long as you can kill Activity, Services and Receiver at the same time without Root, then you will naturally solve the problem of smart process killing, and also solve the problem of Android phone lag and power consumption.

So the next question is how to kill Activity, Services and Receiver at the same time?

If you go to the Settings - Applications - Application Information page in the Android system, you will see a "Force Stop" button. In Android 4.0 and later systems, this button allows you to kill Activities, Services, and Receivers at the same time with one click.

I tested it on a Nexus 4 running Android 5.0. After killing an app in this way, it would not automatically restart in the background even after a night. However, Google apps are not restricted and can be automatically started even if they are "force stopped".

Since most Android phones in mainland China do not have Google services, as long as you can kill unnecessary programs by "force stop", you can solve the problems of Android phone lag and power consumption even without Root permissions.

At the beginning, the method provided by Baidu Mobile Guard was to let users click manually. If you want to kill 10 applications, you may need to click more than 20 times. This is obviously a very frustrating process. So around April, they were also wondering whether it is possible to automatically help users complete this clicking process in batches.

After experimenting with various possibilities, the Baidu Mobile Security Team found that the automatic "force stop" effect can be achieved by calling the auxiliary function in the Android system. Therefore, when you use the acceleration function of the latest version of Baidu Mobile Guard for the first time, it will guide the user to turn on the relevant options under the auxiliary function [Baidu Guard Strong Acceleration]. After that, the user only needs one click to accelerate the phone. Of course, in order to avoid accidental killing, Baidu has also classified the applications, so that those services that need to run in the background can continue to run, and the goal of intelligent process killing is naturally achieved.

So, although people’s instinctive reaction when hearing the word “security” may be worry, solving security problems is actually quite interesting. The answers to those seemingly insurmountable problems are often hidden in unexpected places.