Question

I would like to simply stop the app, and all its activities and services. Currently, from my main activity (which had started other activities), I call finish(), and the app appears to stop, as it goes to the home screen of my device. However, when I check running apps on the device, this app is still listed. It says “one process, and one service”. Is there a way to just kill everything? Or, if I have to do it individually how would I find what is running, and how do I stop it? thanks

Answer 1

Is there some specific reason you want to make sure the process is killed?

Android manages processes intelligently. It keeps your process around, and if the user starts your app again it can use the existing process, rather than start up a new one. And if your device start running low on memory, Android will start killing off these inactive processes to free up resources.

In short, it’s a good thing that Android keeps your process around. You shouldn’t want to have it killed needlessly.

Although it sounds like you may not be stopping your application’s service. If you use bindService to start the service from your activity, the service will automatically be stopped when the Activity is stopped (assuming nothing else has bound to the service). Alternately, if you use startService to start the service, you need to call stopService to stop it.