The Android Project Review: Advanced Task Killer Pro

Category: OS Functionality
Price: $4.99
Gotta-Have-it: 8*

*I gave this application an “8” on the gotta-have-it scale because I believe the functionality of the Android OS is severely limited by the amount of applications that run in the background without some user intervention. I am not giving this rating to the Advanced Task Killer application in particular, but to task killing apps in general. In order to fully enjoy the Android OS, one must install a task killer.

I didn’t have any issues with this app until just recently. I thought it did an adequate job of permitting me to quickly and easily kill the apps that always seem to be running in the background, using up precious phone memory. If that’s all you need in a task killer, this app is fine. However, once you get into the more advanced features, specifically the Autokill function, this app has a few problems.

I believe that an Autokill function that works properly on an Android phone is an important and almost necessary tool to have. I don’t want to be required to open up my task killing app every time I feel like my phone is lagging a bit. I thought Advanced Task Killer was the app that would feel that void in my lonely Android heart. I chose the safest settings for the Autokill because I didn’t want it to destabilize my phone. I also set it to kill apps every 30 minutes or so.

What I found is every so often, if I was using an app at the time the Autokill function was set to execute, Autokill would close it down, no matter what I was doing. Now, there is an option to set up an “Ignore List” to add applications that you don’t want Advanced TaskKiller to kill. However, I haven’t found a way to add an app to the Ignore List unless the app is currently open. Also, I don’t want to add my Brower, or other games to the Ignore List because there are times that I will want to kill those apps if I am not using them.

I then tried something that I would highly recommend against. I set the Autokill to only kill apps when the screen is off. This ended up being a huge mistake because the Autokill completely destabilized my phone. At one point, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and it wouldn’t turn on. I had to remove my battery in order to start up the phone again, which is never a pleasant task. Once the phone restarted, it gave me an error that the SD card was corrupted and needed to be formatted. I had to clean my pants out after seeing that. Luckily I backed up a lot of my information to my computer, but I lost some photos and videos that I haven’t been able to recover. I believe what happened was that the Autokill function killed an app that was accessing the SD card at the time it was killed. This most likely had a negative effect on the SD card, causing it to become corrupted.

So that is the long-winded reason for the “*” next to the gotta-have-it factor above. I can recommend the Advanced Task Killer Android application only as long as you are very careful about how you use the Autokill settings. Other than that, it does a reasonable job of allowing you to kill the apps you want to kill.