I was really pleased with my Droid X when I first got it. Such a big screen! So much potential! But at some point things started to slow down – a lot – to the point where just about everything – even answering a phone call – was somewhere between an unpleasant chore and impossible at times. I lived with it – I don’t really need a smartphone, I sit in front of a desk most of the time while my X sits in its lovely little docking station – and I have more mobile devices and gadgets than I can count, so, they just took over focus from my frustrating phone. Then I saw a statistic about the percentage of Motorola phones that are returned that actually turn out to be a third-party app at fault, and decided to spend a little time investigating. I used Watchdog Task Manager, which ironically was a free app of the day on the Amazon Appstore, to alert me to high CPU use and weed out the culprit. Here comes the ironic part: it’s Amazon Appstore that’s the problem! I’m assuming that “buying” the free daily app…well, almost daily, isn’t such an extreme edge case that I’m pushing it beyond what its developers anticipated – surely this is something that should be accommodated in their design? I’m guessing that it’s my sheer # of apps (currently over 300) that’s causing the CPU hogging – vs. this being something that happens to all users. Anyway, thanks to Watchdog, I now have a distinct notification “ringtone” set up to alert me to kill the Appstore any time it goes rogue. I’ve not gone as far as blacklisting yet, for fear that this could interfere with functionality quite a bit more than the occasional service kill as needed – which one would hope it would be able to handle. The difference after setting this up is night and day, and I can finally get back to enjoying my phone instead of pining away after higher-spec devices that I’m not yet eligible for under contract…!  ̄ー ̄
@IShJR
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