In order to be sold at affordable prices and still make a profit for the manufacturers, entry-level smartphones will always have a less powerful processor and less RAM compared to their midrange and high-end alternatives.
Most users buying devices at this entry-level bracket are not that fussed about performance, but there are a few who get frustrated with the performance of their smartphones and turn to apps claiming to have the ability to free up more RAM and speed up their devices.
Most of these apps will only just kill the background processes on your device, and while this has a small benefit in that the available resources are given to the active app that you are using, these kinds of apps do more harm than good in the long run as Esper’s Android expert Mishaal Rahman explains.
Once a background process that has been killed is needed by the operating system, the CPU cycles required to restart it are usually more, which in turn hogs more resources than if you had just let the OS do its thing without resorting to using a third party app to kill the background processes.
Starting with Android 14 however, Google is looking to limit what these speed booster apps will be able to do. A key API used by these apps called KILL_BACKGROUND_PROCESSES will be restricted and will not affect any other applications apart from their own. Therefore, these speed booster apps will not be able to kill other apps or processes running in the background.
This change was first made in Android 14 DP1. However, the documentation was added with the release of Android 14 DP2 and explains that the change will also work with older Android OS versions.
“It isn’t possible for a 3rd-party application to improve the memory, power, or thermal behaviour of an Android device. You should ensure that your app is compliant with Google Play’s policy against misleading claims,” reads another part of the documentation.
This change is certainly welcome, as some of these speed booster apps are notorious for spamming ads and trackers counterintuitive to what they claim to be doing.
