At this point in Android’s history it has been well established that task killers are a bad thing. Android is built to manage tasks for you. If you constantly kill them you can negatively impact performance. Nowadays we’re too smart to use task killers, but could we be harming performance in a different way?

The developer of Greenify, an app that auto-hibernates rarely used apps, has dropped some knowledge about the recent apps switcher. He says constantly swiping away apps from the recent apps screen is not good practice. “it reduces the efficiency of process cache mechanism in Android, thus impact the performance of your device.”

He says clearing recent apps does free up a lot of memory, but at the expense of later performance and battery consumption. A lot of people like to keep the recent apps switcher clean and tidy by swiping away apps they are done using. This is not a good idea if you plan on using those apps again soon. When the recent apps switcher was new there was debate about what exactly swiping away an app was doing. Now we know it kills the task, just like those task killers of old.