How can I turn off some of my apps that automatically synce?

[Donald Rozenberg]

Lollipop - My Five Minute Brick

Hi,

I have recently installed Lollipop on my 2012 Nexus 7 which has 6MB of storage. I now refer to my Nexus as a "5-minute brick" because when I awaken the tablet, it takes several minutes before it becomes responsive. During that period, I receive notifications about email, about software updates, about new NYTimes articles, about Flipboard articles, about Nook events, etc.. I also suspect that a lot of other sync'ing and thrashing is occurring on behalf of other apps as well. So I sit there swearing at the tablet until it finally opens for business and that literally takes minutes. For instance, I should not have to wait minutes to check the weather forecast or start reading an ebook because Gmail really wants me to know that there is no new mail for me. If I want to check my mail, I believe it would be faster to just fire up Gmail and have it check my mail then.


So my first question is: Is there any way that the I can turn off some or most of that syncing? For instance I have set my NYTimes app to refresh manually and would like to do that will nearly all my apps. Also: Are there lists of avoidable apps which are known to do excessive sync'ing?

I can believe that the authors of many apps believe that their app is the only one that is important enough to actually run and so they feel justified in setting it up to be always up to date. I am sure that the social apps take that approach but I never use any of the social apps so I really don't want to wait for them. I can avoid installing Facebook and Twitter but it is harder to avoid Google+ and Google Play.

On my tablet, I have 6GB of storage of which 2GB are available and about 500MB of ram available. That should be enough to do lots of stuff.

I have one other complaint about the Lollipop interface - the icon for Bluetooth at the top of the screen. Unfortunately, somebody decided to replace a recognizable icon with one that is hard to read. If I attach my Bluetooth earphones, the icon seems to add only two very tiny white dots; I can barely see them. Is there any way to change that icon to a more readable one?

Thanks in Advance,

Don

 

[cpaight]

Re: Lollipop - My Five Minute Brick

Under the accounts section of your settings menu you can set the syncing for many of your apps, especially Google's....though some like Facebook require you to set the sync intervals from with in the app.

Not sure about your bluetooth icon....mine is still the usual B.

On a related note, I was having similar problems with my 2012 N7 after the update....it was slow to start, every action had serious lag, the multitaking button rarely ever brought up my apps....I tried a factory reset, I wiped the cache partition and did several reboots over the course of the last week or so.....sometimes it helped, but then the issues would come back a few hours later. It was very frustrating. Last night out of the blue it suddenly just started working as smoothly as ever...not sure if the OS just had to settle in, but so far I'm cautiously optimistic.