Lags are some of the common and perennial issues plaguing Android devices. Those occasional slow performances, app freezes, and delays in touch responsiveness exhibited by your device do decrease overall productivity. We take a look at five of the reasons why it does, and give your our own take on solutions to solve them.
Too many running apps that hog your memory
It may be possible that there are too many background apps that are consuming much of your memory. This can be really felt if you have a lot of apps installed and your phone is equipped with low-end specs. There will also be instances that your smartphone will slow down after a day or two of operation without turning your device off.
Solution: Restrict apps from running in the background. To prevent them from running behind the scenes, go to Settings > Apps then swipe two times to Running, and select an app. From each individual app’s menu, you may force close or stop the app from running to free up space. If you’re not keen on trying this out and crash your app permanently in the process, you may opt to restart your phone instead.
If that didn’t work, you can try a couple of apps that can freeze (Titanium Backup Pro) or hibernate (Greenify) other memory-hogging apps to permanently free up your RAM. You may also check out alternative apps to replace the feature-filled heavyweights. Some already introduced watered-down versions (such as Facebook Lite), and there are some that offer alternatives to official apps.
Low internal storage
If you like to install a lot of apps or hooked on social media, and you’ve got little space left, the dreaded ‘Low on Space’ notification might have appeared on your notifications a few times. From that point onward, several of your smartphone’s essential functions such as email have been disabled until you are able to maximize your free space.
Solution: Clear cache from applications. The biggest culprit of low internal storage is the prolonged used of applications that take up too much storage cache such as Facebook and Instagram. To clear it, go to Settings > Apps, click on the application from the list of downloaded apps, and select Clear Cache. Like our recommendation above, you can also get more efficient apps that are available on the market to reduce storage footprint.
If it’s not enough, you can move the apps to your microSD card if your phone supports it. At the same location, you can choose to move the app data to your card. You may use utility apps such as App2SD to move them, too. Some pre-installed apps on your devices might not have this function, and you may see that the option has been grayed out.
Outdated software
A probable cause of lag is outdated software. This happens when the system itself suffers from bugs and glitches, or in some cases, comes from sideloaded applications into our devices. Since these sideloaded apps are not downloaded from the Google Play Store, they get looped out of the future update cycles, making them susceptible to error messages.
Solution: Upgrade your system and/or application to the latest version. New updates, other than introducing new features, often provide bug fixes and improvements to issues plaguing the software.
Playing games for long hours
Playing graphic-intense games on our smartphones harnesses the maximum processing potential of your phone’s hardware, and that’s the reason why our phones heat up a lot. This also causes moderate to severe lag especially after playing.
Solution: Rest your device for a few minutes after playing to cool down. If it still lags after that, you may restart the phone to automatically free up RAM space.
Presence of a malware or virus
Did you ever encounter any slowdowns even when you’re using your phone properly? You might have been a victim of malware or viruses plaguing Android devices, which can enter your phone when you ae clicking on suspicious links in websites or mobile advertisements.
Solution: Scan your device to eradicate any abnormalities. Using a mobile scanner app such as AVG or CM. you can search for files on your system and eradicate them in the process.
Note that these are just five typical causes of lag on your Android smartphone, there are other factors that may affect the performance of your smartphone that are not on this guide. Thus, if you’ve experience lag on your device and you were able to identify what caused it and eventually solved it, let us know in the comments field below.
The post What causes Android smartphone lag? (and how to fix them) appeared first on YugaTech | Philippines, Tech News & Reviews.