If you’re phone’s running a little slow and you can’t afford to upgrade, it’s tempting to hit the Play Store and install one of the many apps that claim to be able to speed up your device.
But here’s the thing: they don’t work. We’ve known that since the early days of Android, yet these apps still rack up millions of downloads.
Now, finally, the end might be in sight. A new report suggests that Android 14 is going to put serious restrictions on what these apps can do, and at the same time Google is set to clamp down on apps that make misleading claims.
Android 14 Is Set to Kill Task Killers
In a blog post at Esper, renowned Android expert Mishaal Rahman has been digging into the Android 14 Developer Preview and has uncovered signs that the next version of the operating system will limit what task killers and other so-called speed boosters can do.
The basic idea is that apps that hold the KILL_BACKGROUND_PROCESSES permission will be restricted in how they can use the ActivityManager.killBackgroundProcesses(String) API. It all sounds very technical, but the names give away exactly what these things do.
Right now, task killers use this permission and API to shut down all your apps that are running in the background, with the claim that this will speed up your device. In future, apps will only be able to kill their own background processes.
There’s a good reason for this change. While it sounds logical that shutting down apps will improve your phone’s performance and battery life, task killers don’t work (and neither does closing apps manually). Android is already well capable of managing its resources, and closing apps when they’re no longer needed.
Task killers can often make things worse. Some apps are designed to run in the background. If you keep shutting them down, they’ll simply open straight back up again, using more resources than if you’d left them alone.
Google explains this in the documentation Rahman found for the change:
“Android is designed to keep cached apps in the background and kill them automatically when the system needs memory. If your app kills other apps unnecessarily, it can reduce system performance and increase battery consumption by requiring full restarts of those apps later, which takes significantly more resources than resuming an existing cached app.”
It also comes with a hint that the company might begin properly enforcing one of its long-standing Play Store policies: “It isn’t possible for a 3rd-party application to improve the memory, power, or thermal behavior of an Android device. You should ensure that your app is compliant with Google Play’s policy against misleading claims.”
Google Is Cleaning Up the Play Store
All of this comes with the caveat that Android 14 is still in development, so there’s no guarantee that this change will make it into the final release, or that it will have any real effect. But it does seem that Google is making an effort to clean up one of the sketchier parts of the Play Store.
And if you’re using one of these apps right now, you know what to do: uninstall it immediately, because it isn’t helping.
