Google is cracking down on ‘killer speed booster’ apps; did you download something?

Are you an Android smartphone user? What do you do to speed up your phone? Many third-party mobile apps can also be installed on your Android device for fast operation. It’s worth noting that not all apps you install from the Google Play Store are safe. And now Google plans to crack down on apps that claim to speed up your phone. “Third-party ‘speed booster’ apps can actually do more harm than good, so Google is preparing to crack them down with Android 14 changes and a warning to app developers on Google Play,” the blog reads. Esper stated.

Why are speed booster apps not recommended?

According to the blog post, there is a lot of talk about the effectiveness of “tasking” apps that claim to improve the performance of your Android device. However, it is always recommended not to use such mobile apps. “This is because the operating system already has its own built-in task management mechanisms designed with the memory and performance limitations of mobile devices in mind,” the post reads.

“Killing processes to free memory, no matter what state they are in, or no matter how Android/Linux manages memory, can actually negatively affect performance because the OS has to do more work (and thus more CPU cycle) to cold boot It’s almost always better to let the OS manage memory than to use a third-party “task killer”/”speed booster” app to kill processes, so Google is starting to limit what apps can do and are preparing to restrict how developers sell them on Google Play,” the blog post informs.

They also informed, “Starting with Android 14, one of the APIs commonly used by ‘task killer’ apps will be restricted.” In previous releases, applications with the KILL_BACKGROUND_PROCESSES permission (the “normal”, i.e. install-time permission) call ActivityManager.killBackgroundProcesses(String) to kill all background processes for a given application. This method is equivalent to the kernel killing these processes to reclaim memory and leaving it up to the operating system to restart the processes later if necessary.”

When apps call this method on devices running Android 14, they can only kill their own background processes, regardless of the app’s target API level. Passing the package name of another application has no effect on the background processes of that application, in fact, the syslogs indicate that an invalid package name was sent.