Dormant background applications on mobile devices

The invention relates to dormant background applications on mobile devices. The subject disclosure is directed towards a technology in which a mobile device maintains an application in a dormant state in which the application's process is not terminated and remains in memory, but the application cannot execute code. Further, state and execution context are maintained for the application, allowing the application to be quickly and efficiently resumed into the running state. To prevent the application from executing code while dormant, thread activity is suspended, requests canceled, completed or paused, resources detached, and so forth. Resource usage may be monitored for dormant applications, to remove a misbehaving dormant application process from memory if improperly using resources.