How to stop an android download

This article was co-authored by wikiHow Staff. Our trained team of editors and researchers validate articles for accuracy and comprehensiveness. The wikiHow Tech Team also followed the article's instructions and verified that they work. This article has been viewed 87, times. Learn more This wikiHow teaches you how to pause or cancel a file download in your Android's Notification Center, or cancel an app download from the Play Store. To stop a web download, swipe down from the top of the screen and select Pause or Cancel.

To stop a Play Store download, tap X on the progress bar. Did this summary help you? Yes No. Log in Social login does not work in incognito and private browsers. Please log in with your username or email to continue. No account yet? Create an account. Edit this Article. We use cookies to make wikiHow great. By using our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Cookie Settings. Learn why people trust wikiHow. Download Article Explore this Article methods.

Related Articles. Article Summary. Method 1. Open your mobile internet browser. You can use any mobile browser available on Android, such as Chrome, Firefox, or Opera.

Find the file you want to download on your Android. It could be a document, link, or any type of file. Start your file download. Tap the download button on a web page, or tap and hold a link and select Download link on the pop-up menu. If you accidentally download an app or file that you don't want, you can delete it.

Tap the app name and then tap Uninstall. If the download was a file rather than an app, you can delete it:. Tap Downloads , and you'll see a list of files, all of which are selected. Uncheck any files you want to keep. Tap Free up [X] MB. Your phone will display how much storage you can reclaim. Tap Free up space on the pop-up window. Sometimes a download affects the performance of your smartphone, such as slowing it down or disabling functions. In that case, the best solution is to reset your phone to factory settings.

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Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. By Molly McLaughlin. Molly McLaughlin. Truly crucial apps usually won't allow you to force stop them anyway. So, in the above example, we had no use for Kik, Facebook Pages Manager or a few other running services, so stopped them without error.

In some cases, you may find the service starts back up again automatically. The same rules of which apps are safe to stop apply to cached, as well as running, processes. If you looked around while you were carrying out the steps above, you probably saw some detailed battery info listed for each app. While that's great, working out what's draining your battery by assessing each app individually will take you all day.

Again, the options might have slightly different names and features available, but at a minimum, you should be able to see a listed overview of the apps that have used the most battery since you last juiced-up.

You can then decide which ones you want to stop individually. The same rules apply to stopping or uninstalling apps that applied to stopping them via the processes tab - namely that you want to be careful about what you start pressing.

Some phones split apps in the battery usage tab by system or non-system, and others split them into a list of 'hardware' and 'software' apps. In theory, as each new version of Android adds smarter battery features, the amount you need to play around with manually should go down. In Android Marshmallow, the most significant improvement was Doze, which essentially puts your phone into hibernation mode when it's not moving. For Android Nougat and Doze 2.

Android Oreo imposes Background Execution Limits to ensure that apps won't go crazy with background services or keep listener services open at all times. Samsung and others offer proprietary battery and RAM boosting options in many cases, so the features available to you will vary. Other people suggest that Doze mode actually harmed their battery life, but it's definitely at least worth testing to see if it increases your mileage.

With Android as an OS and OEM hardware improving over time, some people will argue that the use of task killer apps is going to do more harm than good in terms of processing and battery life. As one of the problems you're trying to fix is apps running in the background draining your resources, adding another one that has the purpose of doing explicitly that it needs to monitor the services in use on your phone, therefore always needs to be running seems a bit counter-intuitive.

A task killer that repeatedly force-closes an app in the background over and over is almost certainly going to drain your battery more as it continues the 'restart and kill' process. You might be better off not installing the task killer in the first place and just letting it run. Nonetheless, some people swear by them and you get even more granular control over your OS if you're using a rooted device.