Android 5.1 Lollipop includes some major changes in the way the Recent App are taken care of by Android. Along with inclusion of Chrome tabs in the Recents screen from the first Lollipop release, it now also generates cards to those applications that are called from another activity. This move helps in keeping things consistent.
However, Google has decided not to clear the list of Recent App cards and it just goes on continuously. While this is annoying, Chianfire’s Recently app fixes this issue and limits the number of apps shown on the Recents screen to only those that matter, and does all that without acting like a task killer.
The app removes the entries related to an app from the list of Recent Apps once the user closes the application. There is an option to restrict the number of cards as well. Notably, it does not kill the apps that are not in use, it only hides them from the Recents screen.
Recently does no wakelocks, and has a very small footprint on a device’s battery. The app is free and there is an in-app purchase of $1 that will upgrade it to the Pro version. It is expected to get more features in near future.
We need to wait until Google releases the next Android update to see if there are any changes done to the Recents screen, to get rid of this annoyance. Because Chainfire’s Recently app works only on rooted devices, so users who don’t prefer to root their device will still be stuck with a long list of apps on their Lollipop running phone’s Recents screen.
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