Angry Birds wasn’t using resources in the background - aside from some RAM - but it resumes quickly because it remained cached and ready to resume. When you switch back to Angry Birds, it will become your foreground process and the game will resume quickly. When you leave Angry Birds and enter the Gmail app to view your email, Angry Birds becomes a background process (because it doesn’t have to do anything in the background), while Gmail becomes the foreground process. Angry Birds would be a foreground process while you were playing it. Let’s look at Angry Birds as another example. When you start playing music and leave the music app, the music will continue playing as a service process. While you use it, the music app will be a foreground process. It may be kept around for caching purposes to speed up app launches later, or the system may kill it as necessary.įor example, let’s say you turn on your phone and open a music app. Empty process: An empty process doesn’t contain any app data anymore. They’re kept in memory so you can quickly resume using them when you go back to them, but they aren’t using valuable CPU time or other non-memory resources. You can think of these background processes as “paused” apps. At any given time, many background processes are currently running. They have no impact on the experience of using the phone. Background process: Background processes are not currently visible to the user. For example, if you start playing music and switch to another app, the music-playing is in the background is being handled by a service process. However, it’s doing something in the background, such as playing music or downloading data in the background. Service process: A service process isn’t tied to any app that’s visible on your screen. For example, the foreground process may be a dialog that allows you to see an app behind it - the app visible in the background would be a visible process. Visible process: A visible process isn’t in the foreground, but is still affecting what you see on your screen. There are only a few foreground processes at any given time.

Other processes can also be considered foreground processes - for example, if they’re interacting with the process that’s currently in the foreground. Foreground process: The app you’re using is considered the foreground process. A process on Android can be in one of five different states at any given time, from most important to least important:

Android process monitor cpu