The Story

Running multiple apps on your Android can kill its performance. It’s particularly important if you’re not running one of today’s super-smartphones or a tablet. You’ll notice some real performance advantages when you first turn your phone on compared to at the end of an app-heavy day. So while Android can multitask, it doesn’t mean you necessarily should. At least not with 46 apps at the same time…

The Experience

Appkik allows you to take control of your phone’s memory and kill apps that are taking up precious processing power. Look down the list of running apps and Appkik will tell you how much processing power is being used by each. Tot it up and killing them all off represents a genuine performance boost. You can kill apps running in the background and foreground and, if you know what you’re doing, you can hit the system apps tab and kill of those as well. Be warned – injudicious use of this can cause your phone to crash. A quick reboot will sort it, mind. Killing apps is as simple as tapping the target next to its name, sadly this is so enjoyable, we tended to get carried away…

Appkik doesn’t just lay waste to errant applications, however. It also backs them up. Your apps can be arranged by name, by date installed, most recently accessed or by a user-definable ‘favourites’ folder. Select a group of apps, and you can uninstall them all in one fell swoop. Alternatively, if you’re feeling more love for said apps, you can share recommendations via email or social media. Finally, and most impressively, you can back up your apps onto your SD card, should the worst happen.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of backing up apps, should you delete one and then have a change of heart, you can restore it from the deleted apps folder within Appkik. Now that’s what we call a neat touch.

We recently began banging on about Apps2SD and it’s a neat app. Appkik, however, does that job as well, neatly analysing all the apps on your device and sorting out which can be moved to SD card to free up space.

The Bottom Line

Task killing, SD moving and app backup in one beautifully designed package. Recommended.

Additional Info

Version reviewed 1.2
Requires Android 1.5 or higher

Diune