[Desire HD General] metonymous:
Based on my experience thus far with my HTC Desire HD, and feedback from friends and reddit/r/android I've been writing up an overview of pragmatic tips, tricks, and "best practices" to keep your Android happy.

So, I present my Pragmatic Tips to a Healthier Android. Or rather, I would, but seems I need 8 posts first. So I present some of the tips. Hope the are useful to someone.

I'm VERY interested in feedback (corrections) via the members of this forum, if any group of people would be able to correct my errors it would likely be xda-developers, but without my post, not sure I'll get much.

This part of the tips is on managing apps and giving proper app feedback.

Apps Badly Behaving

regularly check the "running apps" screen

if there are apps there you haven't launched since reboot, make a serious judgement call as to whether you need that app or not. check all the options for that app, seeing if you can disable features that might be triggering the "run in background"-ness, if you've disabled all features, and the app isn't a "it needs to do this" (i.e. handsent sms and the like) app, uninstall the bastard. It's poorly written to behave like that, so post a comment on their rating to the effect of "stop running background apps unnecessarily" and "one star" it (if you're as mean as me :)

apps that stay in the notification bar, and stay listed as "ongoing" (I'm looking at you third party media apps) even when they are not actively doing anything, are behaving badly. Give them the honour of a 1 star rating and a comment as to their offense (if they fix it consider fixing your rating), such as "If you're not 'active' don't stay active, biatch, 1 star till fixed, uninstalled"

Well Intentioned Apps

(AFAIK) androids "intents" and the like should make it unnecessary for apps to "launch" with the OS, or constantly stay active

by this I do NOT mean they just stay resident, that's a good thing, that's Android doing it's "i'm your OS dammit let me manage your memory" thing

Refusing to Quit (Properly)

some apps, usually without good reason, have a quit button. These apps will remain (the Android definition of) active unless you push quit from within the app, (usually) irrespective of how you exit the app

this is similar to the "apps written badly" rant, if they stay in the notification "ongoing" and aren't ongoing, uninstall the app and give the dev a piece of your mind

some apps don't quit when you push "back" and leave the app. This is against Android conventions, so again, give the dev feedback. (And learn how to quit it "it's" way. Or uninstall it, simpler!)

some apps don't quit when you leave them via the home key (see previous point)

some apps never quit. uninstall

Uninstall. Please uninstall?

Manners aren't going to help you here, and I'm not sure why this isn't better documented.

Some (eg. Widgetsoid, F-Secure Mobile Security) apps don't uninstall when you think they should.

This is (in my experience) because you've at some point given those apps "administrative" privilages.

Having these privalges somehow enables them to prevent their own uninstallation (or something along those lines).

For both the aformentioned apps, go into your settings -> security (or locations, YMMV) and find something like "adminstrators allowed" or something. You'll find your apps listed there. Uncheck them, and then you can uninstall them!

Huzzah! No more annoying uninstallable background processes, even if they are neato apps, uninstall should "just work" or at least be warned (and NO widgestoid developer I don't think that the last line of your lengthy readme which points uninstall issues to the FAQ is "obvious enough" as how to uninstall you properly).