Suspend Execution For Cached Apps : Improve Battery Life of S22 Ultra

You may or may not have heard that enabling the “Suspend Execution For Cached Apps” option (available at Settings > Developer Options) significantly improves the battery life of the S22 Ultra. You will want to know what Suspend Execution For Cached Apps option is all about, which Android sets support it at this moment and most importantly – what you can expect.

Since the year 2020, Google was testing new features on Android 11 to improve battery life. A new feature was seen on the Android 11 Beta 2 but the update wasn’t live. From the source of Android 11, few reported that Google was freezing apps while they are cached to extend the battery life (we are talking about Pixel 3 and Pixel 4 smartphones). But the obvious limitation is that – the cached apps after being frozen can no longer re-open to the same page. Finally, the Suspend Execution for Cached Apps feature was introduced in the Android 11 Developer Preview 3 and was officially introduced as a new feature in Android 12.

Samsung introduced Suspend Execution for Cached Apps feature in their Android 12 builds (One UI 4). So, not only Galaxy S22, this feature is available on all the sets which are running Android 12 (Fold3, Fold4, Flip3, Flip4, Galaxy S21, S20, and S10). We are not sure about Samsung A series smartphones.

It is noteworthy to mention that Samsung officially has many tips to improve battery life:

How Suspend Execution For Cached Apps option works

Now, you may ask a basic question “Can you tell me in plain English what the thing it is?”

For example, you are using the Chrome browser to read this page from your mobile device. Now you suddenly returned to the Home screen by pressing the Home button or just switched to some other app. In this scenario, Chrome will cache our site in your phone’s RAM. You can understand – this is a useful feature in certain situations. If Suspend Execution For Cached Apps option is enabled, RAM will no longer hold our webpage on your phone’s RAM. So, your phone’s RAM and CPU will be freed up.

In both cases, web server technology will understand you are you when you will switch back to Chrome again and resume reading our article. Servers know you from the combination of your data (for some of which you accept cookie consent). Just the webpage may reload again. In the above example with our website – enabling Suspend Execution For Cached Apps option will not harm your experience. Indeed, it can save your resources. But in reality, with websites like ours, the difference will be minute. Websites like ours are optimized to reduce the load on your device (so that the webpage loads faster and do not continuously drain your resources).

Now think about applications such as Facebook. These specific websites continuously get updated whenever they are kept ON. Enabling Suspend Execution For Cached Apps option will drastically reduce their resource consumption when you are not actively using the app.

From time to time, badly coded Android apps or Facebook-like apps or Apps with evil intentions may be a huge resource killer (ultimately you will experience lesser battery life). So, it is practical to Suspend Execution For Cached Apps.

How I can enable Suspend Execution For Cached Apps option?

It is enabled by default on S22 Ultra. You can re-enable it. The question can be, when the feature is enabled by default then why do the users are seeing the difference after they re-enable it? Maybe the default settings are conditional, Enabled settings are recursive.

By default, the developer options are hidden. You may follow these steps to enable Galaxy S22 (or any Samsung Galaxy phone) developer options. Open Settings. Access the software info page. On the About phone page, tap Software information. Tap Build number 7 times. Normally, after 3 times of taps, a head-up notification will tell you that “you are now x steps away from being a developer”.

Go back to the Settings page. You’ll get “Developer options”. Scroll down (or search) and you’ll find the Suspend Execution For Cached Apps option. You can choose to re-enable it, it will then ask you to reboot the phone.