Question

Is there a way using the current command line tools (adb, am, pm) to emulate a user pressing Force Stop from the Settings app? Calling kill <pid> from the shell only works so well as to emulate what happens when the system kills a process, but Force Stop does more to remove the memory of an application by removing its ActivityRecord instances that Android saves around.

Is there a shell command we can call to emulate this same behavior?

Cheers.

Answer 1

Use am:

am force-stop: force stop everything associated with <PACKAGE>.

am kill: Kill all processes associated with <PACKAGE>.  Only kills.
  processes that are safe to kill -- that is, will not impact the user
  experience.

for example:

adb shell am force-stop <PACKAGE>