Why do apps close when they are ran in the background and I switch back to them?

[mrenriquekike]

It keeps happening often that applications close when switching to another app. an example is listening to music on pandora then pressing the home button and navigating to another application like google chrome or pokemon go, and pandora will close and the music will stop. is there a setting anywhere where i can enable certain or all apps to continue running in the background?

[edmonddantes182]

Hey mrenriquekike, do you mind stating what Xperia you have and what OS your device is on? This sounds like an issue with RAM Management.

[mrenriquekike]

I apologize, i have the Xperia X (F5121) on android 6.0.1

[Emir1]

Hi @mrenriquekike,

Does this only occur with specific apps? To my knowledge there are some apps like Youtube and Pokemon Go that are meant to "take over" the media sound once initialized, pausing other media apps which are in the background. 

Does it only occur when you use Pandora, or will the same thing happen if you use the native Music app for example?

[mrenriquekike]

It is not that the music is muted, it actually closes the app. That was only an example, i guess a better example would be switching tabs on different apps that are open, and having the app restart everytime i switch to it. If i am browsing the internet, and i get a text message, i read the text message and when i come back to browsing, the entire app restarts and has to reload the page. This is tedious in applications that take a long time to open up, like pokemon go, pandora, or netflix. i hope this makes sense

[ykphuah]

Android does kills apps when it runs out of memory, however, this is quite rare from my experience.

An easy way to test this try what you did after you do a reboot, and see if that still happens.

I assume you haven't fiddled with anything under the Developer Settings?

[Emir1 · Accepted solution]

I now understand what you mean. As some users mentioned in this thread, this is the way that Android handles applications.

Android manages RAM in such a way that when you let an application run in the background, it may close down if more RAM is needed for the other applications. So for example let's say that your device has 1GB of RAM, and you run Chrome which takes up 500MB, as well as the Music app which takes up 300MB. You want to open Pokemon Go which needs 400MB of RAM, this means that the device has to suspend an app in the background order to clear RAM for the current app that you're about to use.

There's no way to change app handling, but my advice would be to close down apps in the Background which are not in use so that they don't occupy RAM. Also, try restarting your device once you've done so in order to start fresh and see if that helps.

[mrenriquekike]

Thanks alot for the help! Restarting helped a little, and i got a better understanding under storage and memory to see what apps use up more of the RAM

[Emir1]

Anytime!