Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and S6 edge+ aggressively killing background tasks

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Published 24 Aug 2015

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Galaxy S6 edge+ multitasking

Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 edge+ have been found to be aggressively killing background tasks, making it difficult to multitask across multiple apps, despite 4GB of RAM.

In the video below from Android Policethe S6 edge+ can be seen multitasking alongside a Nexus 6 running the latest Android 6.0 Marshmallow preview. Both devices are made to open the same series of apps and perform the same tasks.

After opening four or five apps, there’s a noticeable difference in the way in which each device handles each one while it is in the background. While the Nexus 6 is able to remember what each app was doing before it was closed, the S6 edge+ has to reload it, which produces a noticeable delay.

The big difference between these two devices, of course, is their software. The Nexus 6 is running pure Android without any bloat, while the S6 edge+ is running TouchWiz, which has third-party tweaks from Samsung that obviously cause it to kill background tasks very aggressively.

There are several reasons why Samsung may have chosen to do this, such as trying to extend battery life by ensuring that closed apps do not hog resources and data. But on a device like the S6 edge+, which has an octa-core processor and 4GB of RAM, multitasking should be much more seamless.

Samsung has certainly made big improvements to TouchWiz for its latest devices, but videos like this prove that there’s still plenty of work to be done.