Android App Review: TasKiller

With the multitasking capability on the android platform it is essential to have some way to manage apps. I have found that most apps don't have an option to shut down or close. They just run, or at least stay open, in the background until you kill them. Most apps that stay open don't seem to cause problems. They go into a low resource mode. On the other hand I have come across a few apps that seem to be resource hogs if left open in the background. I tried quite a few task killing apps, all free. All of them had the ability to close individual apps or all at once. For the most part the task killers fell into two categories. Those that would lead me to believe that an app had been killed by removing it from the list only to find that it was actually still running when the list was refreshed, and those that would redirect me to the system menu when I tried to kill an app where I would have to perform additional steps that I could do without the management app. Every one that I tried seemed to lack the permissions to actually kill the apps. Then I found TasKiller. It has some great widget options that show what is running and it actually kills apps with one touch. There are still some apps that it doesn't seem to be able to kill, mostly system stuff so it hasn't been an issue.

The bottom row is my preferred widget for this app. It shows how much memory is available, a small icon for apps that are running and the red android button kills all apps.

The red android on the second row is a simpler widget that just shows available memory and kills all apps.

When you launch the application you have the option to kill individual apps from this screen.

QR code for TasKiller

I have seen the available memory well below 100Megs and I usually get about 218Megs by using TasKiller.

TasKiller
Thumbs up for ease of use
Thumbs up for usefulness
Thumbs up for visual design
Thumbs up for cost: $0

For me this app is a must have.