Future Android Versions May Take It Easy On Background Apps

Future Android versions may end up taking it easy on background apps. This information comes from XDA Developers, as a new discovery has been made.

It can be quite frustrating when Android kills an app in the background, an app you wanted to keep active and get back to. Well, that may not be much of a problem in the future.

Truth be said, this is not an issue for all phones, different Android iterations from OEMs handle this in different ways. Some are more aggressive than others, so you may not even be bothered by it.

Future Android versions may take it easy on background apps, offer improved performance

Improvement in this regard would be welcomed regardless, though. Future Android versions will improve things, maybe even Android 13, though that can’t be confirmed as of now.

This will happen thanks to a feature called ‘Multi-Generational Least Recently Used’ aka MGLRU. This feature has already been rolled out to Chrome OS, and that feature is on its way to Android.

A commit on the Android Gerrit reveals that Google merged the change for Android 13’s Generic Kernel Image (GKI). Another commit shows that it could be possible to enable it via adb soon.

Do note that the second commit we’ve mentioned hasn’t been merged yet, but it’s under review at the moment. So, it may be by the time Android 13 comes knocking.

Google identified an 18-percent decrease in OOM app killings

So, how does this feature benefit users? Well, first, Google has identified a 40-percent reduction in kswapd CPU usage thanks to this feature. The company has also identified a decrease in 18-percent of out-of-memory (OOM) app killings on Android.

A Google engineer said that the company tested MGLRU on “one million” Android devices. It was added that “substantial improvements in terms of CPU utilization and memory pressure” were spotted, which resulted in fewer OOM kills and also reduced UI latency.

For those of you who are out of the loop, kswapd is the process that manages virtual memory. So, all in all, this feature could end up being quite useful when it comes to overall Android OS performance.

It is unclear if this feature will be available in Android 13, but it’s possible. On the flip side, Google may only end up testing it with Android 13, and fully enable it at a later date, we’ll see.