How do Task Managers kill apps?

android taskmanager
Bhaskar Kandiyal picture Bhaskar Kandiyal · Jun 10, 2011 · Viewed 15.5k times · Source

First of all I know it's bad to use a task manager/killer in Android and all that, but what I was wondering is how do task managers like Advanced Task Killer kill other applications?
I wanted to develop a simple application that would do this, just for the learning experience.
I tried executing the Linux command kill pid from my application but it didn't work, maybe it requires root?

So, how do I accomplish this from my application? I have a simple ListActivity that shows the currently running tasks and when a user long-presses an item I want to kill that task.

Answer

Bhaskar Kandiyal picture Bhaskar Kandiyal · Jun 12, 2011

You can send the signal using:

Process.sendSignal(pid, Process.SIGNAL_KILL);

To completely kill the process, it's recommended to call:

ActivityManager.killBackgroundProcesses(PackageName)

before sending the signal.

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