n its earliest days and versions, opening a whole bunch of apps in a row on an Android device would leave many of them in that device's memory, causing your short attention span to gum up the works.
Memory usage improved, though, and popular "task killers" became an unnecessary utility. Then, in Android 4.0, there appeared a list of recent applications, which seemed meant for easy app-switching. And yet: you could swipe apps away. What did that do? Well, it seemed to "close" them, because they'd load up fresh, from their launch screen, the next time you tapped on them. But then again, if it was something like an email app, or Twitter, you'd keep getting notifications. So what does "swiping" do, exactly?
As is often the case: ask an experienced developer, one who can write in Plain English. Dianne Hackborn works on Android at Google, and uses Google+ to spark a number of discussions on the platform and its intricacies. Here's what Dianne says about "swiping" an app, per a Android StackExchange discussion, via a Lifehacker post on that topic:
Actually, removing an entry in recent tasks will kill any background processes that exist for the process. It won't directly causes services to stop, however there is an API for them to find out the task was removed to decide if they want this to mean they should stop. This is so that removing say the recent task of an e-mail app won't cause it to stop checking for e-mail.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon