Root – Apps To Use

[How To] Make Apps Enter Sleep Mode on Android In Background

Multitasking has always been one of Android’s key strength. Compared to iOS and Windows Phone 7/8, Android is the only mobile OS that provides true multitasking. However, the downside to this is the extremely poor battery life. By keeping apps running in the background, the battery life of Android devices are adversely affected. Most Android apps will keep a process running in the background even if you don’t use them, which costs some precious resources and drains battery life.

Since there is no task manger in Android and the processes are handled at a system level, there is no way to stop these processes from running the background and preserve battery life and resources along with it. Using a task killer does not help, since these processes automatically restart again.

Greenify, a recently released app on the Play Store, allows you to hibernate apps from running in the background thus saving you precious resources and battery life. The only downside to Greenify is that it requires root access and only works on user installed apps, and not on system/pre-installed apps.

How To Hibernate Apps In The Background On Your Android Device To Preserve Resources

Step 1: Download Greenify from the Play Store, if you have not already. When you first start the app, make sure you provide it with root access.

Step 2: You now need to add apps that constantly run in the background to Greenify. Pressing the + button on the top-right will display a list of apps that are currently running in the background, along with apps that may slow the system down.

Step 3: You can now select any app that you want to hibernate, and it will be successfully added to Greenify’s list. To hibernate the app though, you will need to once again tap on it and then press the pause button on the top.

Step 4: To add more apps, you will need to repeat Steps 2 and 3 again. If you want to hibernate an app that is not listed by Greenify, you can tap the 3-dots menu button and select the ‘Pick an app to greenify’ option. You can now select any app from your app drawer, and then tap the Greenify notification in the notification drawer to hibernate it.

Conclusion

Greenify will only work for user installed apps, and not system apps. This can be a big downer if your phone comes with lot of bloat pre-installed, and you want to hibernate them. Also keep in mind that if you hibernate an app, you will stop receiving background/push notifications from it when the app is in the background. So don’t hibernate IM clients, email applications and other such apps like Whatsapp etc.

[Solved] Use ‘LagFix’ To Fix UI Lag Issues On Android Phones and Tablets Devices

With Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, Google tried to fix all the lags and slowness that Android phones are usually associated with via Project Butter and the company was more than successful in doing so. Project Butter/Jelly Bean brought with it a never-experienced before like level of smoothness to Android devices. In fact, post Jelly Bean, the Galaxy Nexus, which is powered by a 1.2GHz dual-core Cortex-A9 processor, was as smooth as the international Galaxy S3 that sports a much powerful quad-core processor.

As a Galaxy Nexus owner, I can vouch for Project Butter effectiveness. I was used to wiping my phone after every couple of weeks because it used to lag like crazy. All those issues were fixed in Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean for me. However, over time I did notice a slowness or lags especially while or after installing or uninstalling any app on my phone. A simple restart, however, fixed the lag issues.

The Galaxy Nexus is not the only phone suffering from this problem. Other devices such as the Nexus 7, One X and the Xperia S are also known to suffer from similar issues.

It turns out that the root cause of the problem is that the internal NAND chips on these devices are not properly TRIM’ed. TRIM automatically re-arranges the data on the NAND on block level for faster performance. The lack of TRIM can lead to fragmentation in blocks, higher access time and poor I/O performance.

An XDA user – AuxLV – has released an app in the Play Store that aims to fix this problem by running a simple command to TRIM the NAND storage of your Android device.

How To TRIM The NAND Storage Of Your Android Device/Use LagFix For Reducing Lags On Your Android Device

Before you proceed with the steps below, make sure you have root access. The app will not work without root access. While the app is mainly intended for the Nexus 7 and HTC One series of devices, it may be effective on other Android devices as well. If the app does not support your device or detects an issue, it will automatically throw up an error.

Step 1: Simply head over to the Play Store and install the LagFix (fstrim) app on your device. The first screen of the app will be something similar to this -:

Now, just press the ‘Run!’ button and wait for the app to TRIM the filesystem of the internal NAND storage. You will be requested to allow Root access to Lagfix. Wait for sometime after providing root access for the command to do its job. Depending on the size of your internal storage and the amount of data stored, it can take up to a few minutes. Do not minimize or stop the process in between.

Step 2: Once the app has successfully completed TRIM’d your Android device internal storage, restart your Android device and you are done.

Conclusion

Nearly every review on the Play Store about LagFix has a five-star rating, with each and every user experiencing a noticeable improvement in speed and reduction in lag. If you own a Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 7, or the HTC One series phone, do give LagFix a try. If you own any other Android device and are tired of the frequent lags, LagFix might just be what your phone or tablet needs.