Android Automatic Killer…I Mean Task Killer

So I was listening to This Week In Android, or may be it was This Week In Google, I don’t recall which and they were talking about task killing on Android. I was shocked and slightly amused to hear one of the hosts suggest “Advanced Task Killer Free” as the best application for management of applications and thus resources on your phone. I don’t expect the hosts of those shows to actually find my blog but I do expect that they will eventually hear about the much better solution. For the rest of us here is what I’ve got. The app is called “Automatic Task Killer” which also happens to be a free application. While it does in fact do a majority of the same things “Advanced Task Killer Free” does like white listing, kill on sleep etc. the “Automatic Task Killer” app does one little thing that seems to make all the difference in the world. Timed task killing. Instead of killing everything on the list immediately when the phone’s screen blanks you can’t set it to wait a certain amount of time before killing the tasks. This is especially useful if you are using Google maps or something of the sort that you may need to look away from for a time and then come back to. It will still let the screen sleep but with out wiping out what you were doing immediately. This seems a far more elegant solution than having to immediately kill everything or open the task killing app and manually kill. I’ve been running this setup with a 5 minute kill time and the behavior of my phone is near perfect.