Develop Reference

Is there somethign similar to the Windows Task Manager for the android emulator

I was studying some tutorials on Android programming and I realized that pressing the Home button on the emulator takes me tot he phones Desktop, but my sample that was running at the time only goes to the background and does not get destroyed. However, if I press the return button, the app is destroyed as well. So I am assuming there might be other apps running int he background as well, those which I am not aware of. Is there something in the android emulator resembling the task manager from windows, which shows what apps are currently running on the phone? I don't have a smartphone with me, but I remember seeing something like that on my friend's smartphone a few days ago. It wasn't an external app but was something built into the phone, I could access it by going to Settings or something.
Is there a task manager built into the android emulator, or is there any other way I can see such things through the SDK debugger?

Inside the settings, there is a list of currently running processes.

First , Leaving the activity does not mean the process ends, It is just not invisible . When the Os needs more memory ,it will be recovered.
If you want to have a backup process, you can start a back service.
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Service.html

Here is how I end a process (only works on Android 4.0+).
Instead of pressing home, press recent and swipe away the process you want to end. Then press home (or back).
You can also use this to close those nasty apps that prevent you from closing them by not allowing back button to work on their main screens.
This is much quicker than having to go to settings, etc.

Android application seems to continue running after exiting

This might be a bit of a stupid question but my application seems to stay running even after I have stopped it. I close it by holding down the home key and dragging the application off to the left. However, I still see logcat output, it only stops if I go to settings-->Apps-->Running Apps and stop it this way. Is this a bug in my application or is this expected android behavior?

This is expected . Android behaviour
Unlike many other Operating Systems, Android does by default not have a dedicated button to close an application manually. This is because Android is designed to manage the running applications itself and close them as needed.
By design, Android handles the memory and time assigned to applications. This ensures that applications that are left opened do not cause the smartphone to slow down or run out of memory.
When pressing Home button, your app will go to the background and Android O/S will close it when low on memory. If not and you open the application again, it resumed where you left off.
Unless you specifically create a method in your application that closes (finishes) your app.

Intentionally have the system close and restart app

I have been seeing errors come back from my application that it's force closing after the system stop's it and the user bring it back to the front at a later time.
I have some idea's as to what is causing this but I would like to be able to reproduce this error before attempting to fix it.
Does anyone know a way to get the android system to behave like it needs the memory my application is using and close it so I can easily and continually reproduce this error?

Using the Dev Tools app on your emulator, you can have the OS destroy an application as soon as it's stopped.
From the documentation:
Immediately destroy activities
Tells the system to destroy an activity as soon as it is stopped (as if Android had to reclaim memory). This is very useful for
testing the onSaveInstanceState(Bundle) / onCreate(android.os.Bundle)
code path, which would otherwise be difficult to force. Choosing this
option will probably reveal a number of problems in your application
due to not saving state. For more information about saving an
activity's state, see the Activities document.
You can find this under Development Settings once you're in the Dev Tools app. So, when running your application, you could just switch to another application (like clicking on the emulator's hard phone button), and return to yours to test the destroy/create process.

If you are using Eclipse or DDMS you can select your app in the process list and hit the stop button. This should close your app.

Re-opening activity kills process

In my app when i press home button and open the app from menu or shortcut it returns in the same screen but the pid of the process is killed.
BUT
if i hold home button and choose my app from there it will resume normally
This problem is not happenig in all devices 2.2.1 and 2.3.5 samsung galaxy Ace
if is solved again ( i doubt i lost many hours searcing) please link the answer
Thanks in advance
EDIT
In 2.3.6 Samsung Nexus S doesn't happen.

You shouldn't worry about that. The whole Android ecosystem is built around the concept of never terminating your application yourself, and letting the OS handle that aspect of things, and it's working very well if your app is written following the good practices.
Make good use of the Activities lifecycle methods (onPause, onResume, onStop, etc.), and everything will work smoothly, whether your app has been effectively terminated or kept in the background by Android.

Android java touch battery icon

I have a weird problem. My android app runs fine I can open other programs and then reopen my app and it has no problem. When i touch the battery icon it closes and it resets all of my data. Does anyone know whats going on?
The basic setup of my app is from this tutorial. I'm having some problems when the application leaves focus it seems to drop out and crash randomly.

After searching through my code I found that my UpdateThread for my custom surface view was not restoring itself properly. So it was pausing and then not copying its values to a new thread when the app got focus again.