Android users can get into a hot debate when trying to convince someone of the merits or non-merits of using task killers to manually kill apps and save battery life. I lean on the side of the argument that says task killers don’t help save battery life, at least not enough for it to matter. Apparently PC World has taken it upon themselves to do some testing and prove that task killers really don’t help all that much to save battery life:
(photo credit: PC World)
As you can see, the percentage is negligible. It takes more effort than is worth it to manage your apps manually with a task killer, so just relax and let the OS handle it! Android, starting with Froyo, was built with multitasking in mind, so it has algorithms to determine when to kill idle tasks. When you use a task killer app, you muck up the algorithm. In the case of the Galaxy S2, using a task killer seems to have cause a loss of a couple minutes of battery life. HTC saw a decent gain in battery life, but as Droid Life mentioned, the Sense UI is obviously a battery hog, so it’s not that surprising that manual task management helped more in that case.
Of course, this is likely not an entirely scientific, stringent test, but the results are good enough to show that Android users would benefit from letting the OS handle killing tasks in the background.
Via Droid Life
