Shutting down Android background services

Tracked by Jolla (Rejected)

asked 2018-11-09 14:14:18 +0200

Warburgia gravatar image

updated 2018-11-25 18:39:21 +0200

rozgwi gravatar image

Hi, Firstly, I have looked extensively through the knowledge base on this, and although this is an old problem there are no clear answers. The issue has apparently been 'solved' by a release involving Apps>app>'allow/disallow application services to start on boot up; only it hasn't. I have Whatsapp and Skype installed (for reasons of external compatibility), and both remain resident in the background when closed, and load on startup despite the 'allow/dissallow' - I know this from the Crest and Lighthouse apps which show it, but these do not offer options to kill such apps operating in the background. I can perhaps understand this - not permitting users to kill a vital process, but Android apps should not fall into this category. All I would like to do is to control what runs on my device and when (and who/what is tracking me..) Can anyone please advise on how to kill these Android background apps - including an app that does it, or a string to kill the process from a Terminal. Thank you in advance for your kind advice.

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Comments

That's a very annoying behaviour of Android apps, and so far it's not really possible to control it (see here). You may stop such apps in the GUI (settings > apps), but that doesn't prevent them from being restarted immediately sometimes.

I am also curious about more sophisticated solutions. It should be possible to regularly kill unwanted Android apps by a script, based on a white or black list.

ziellos ( 2018-11-09 15:35:47 +0200 )edit

I am shocked. Having options to disable these tells us we are in charge, and then you find out something like this. The only way is to get rid of android support.

Jolla! We need your comment here!!

potski ( 2018-11-09 17:14:42 +0200 )edit

This is why I got rid of Opera again. Some Apps come with a separate daemon it seems.
And that somehow is not registered in the settings. Let's hope there will be an update to Alien Dalvik to amend this. AFAIC this is a limitation of privacy/control settings in Android 4.

rozgwi ( 2018-11-10 01:21:36 +0200 )edit

Thank you for your comments. I have been trying a few things, but haven't got anywhere yet. I enabled developer mode, which gave me a terminal. I can launch 'top' from the command line and can see the PID number of the, for example, skype process, but the 'kill' command does not work (I assume not installed), and neither does 'apt', which would allow me to install 'htop' which is designed for that job. Sudo is not present either.

Warburgia ( 2018-11-11 12:49:51 +0200 )edit

In order to kill processes of Android apps, you have to be root. Therefore you need either devel-su or sudo (search the forum on how to install the latter).

As far as I know, apt is the package manager of Debian-based distributions. Sailfish OS uses rpm instead. However you should be able to install most tools from the openrepos repository by using the Storeman app (from this repository).

ziellos ( 2018-11-11 18:56:07 +0200 )edit