# cm9, dock mode, auto stop apps, etc



## kingmoocow (Oct 13, 2011)

I'm the type of user that can't stand to have a ton of apps open in the background unless I'm actively using them... 
I guess I just gotten used to the way gingerbread handled closing apps,so the way ics does it kind of bugs me. I've become used to having the back button tap to exit an app,and the home button move it to the background. Obviously, both move it to the background now,and you can see it running when you hit the app switch button, and drag it away to kill it. Cm9 has the developer option to long press back to force kill an app, so that works well enough for me, but in some cases you just have to force kill the application from switcher.

Dock mode from the touchstone is one case that just bothers me. Take the tp off this touchstone,and those clock just moves to the background, and you have to manually kill it.

I've tried setting gasket to kill it if its running while not docked,and it doesn't work. I've tried using 'dock no-op' to prevent the clock from launching at all, and it works as advertised,but when taken off the dock now I have dock noop in the running tasks...

And thoughts on how to get cm9 to handle this more like gb did? Or is this a bug? Or is it just how ics is now


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## CarlH (Mar 12, 2012)

kingmoocow said:


> And thoughts on how to get cm9 to handle this more like gb did? Or is this a bug? Or is it just how ics is now


This is how Android has worked since at least 3.0. What you see as "open in background" or "running" when you hit the app switch button, may not actually be open or running or in memory. It's more of a "recent task list" than a "running in background list". Just flick them away to maintain a neat-enough list. If these items are using resources, and Android needs the resources for something else, Android will terminate them to get the resources.

BTW if you don't believe that it's a recent task list, you can prove it very easily. You know what your browser home page is. Open the browser and go to another site with just one tab open. Now close that tab. The browser disappears. But it's still shown when you look at the "background" list. Is it running? When you click on it from the "background" list, it will open to the home page, because it wasn't running and you just started it.


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