Jaiku mobile is designed to be always-on application.

Jaiku Mobile broadcasts your presence information event to your Jaiku friends who use Jaiku Mobile. Presence includes availability, location, friends nearby and next Calendar. This is one of the main features of Jaiku Mobile client in addition to conversation that you do by posting jaikus and commenting them.

Background process is broadcasting and receiving this updates and little icon in idle screen is there to notify user that there is Jaiku running on background.

If you want to use Jaiku just occasionally to browse discussion and post jaikus and comments, you can close Jaiku by selecting Options -> Exit. This stops presence broadcasting also. On the otherhand, our mobile pages http://m.jaiku.com might be a better fit for that kind of use case.

Cheers,
Teemu Kurppa
Jaiku Mobile developer