OUR DIFFERENCES
Android apps, in general, behave a whole lot better than apps on the desktop. One of the ideas for this is the way garbage is collected on Android, and the memory management on the cell phone. Garbage collection is more of a recycling of memory rather than anything else. When an app is opened, it also requires the allocation of some form of RAM. When it needs more memory, RAM is reallocated on the device in order to provide a larger memory for the app. When the app is closed down, the memory is sent back to the pool to be used by Android. However, there are times that memory recovery and reallocation can cause some problems.
There are some things that you can do. In most instances, these are the steps which technical personnel follows to diagnose your phone. You should do these first before going to your nearest cellphone repair shop.
- Restart the phone. Turning it off and on usually works for most problems with the app. This frees up memory, as well as any memory related conflict that may be happening. If it is a one-off error, it will not occur again. If it is something else, you might need to do some other things besides.
- Dismount the microSD card and then insert it back again. What this does is it removes the card and any app which runs from it. If your misbehaving app is on the card, then it would first stop operation before restarting fresh. You might also need to use a different SD card in your phone. If this works, then the suspect is the old SD card. You can check out the old SD card in another phone and see if the problem replicates itself. This discounts the possibility that it is an app on the card, or the card itself might be defective.
- Do a Wipe Cache Partition. Sometimes an app will not work properly when the cache is full. It would not have enough space to place temporary data. Most apps will hang if they cannot write their temporary files. In some instances, there are some apps which do not clean up and delete their own temporary files. These are an exception, as it is an automated process when an app exits. There are also instances when a zombie process continues in the background. This is due to an app which has not properly closed.
- If all else fails, backup your important data and do a factory reset. The factory reset will restore your Android device to its original state right out of the box. All your data and apps will be destroyed, and all your settings will be reset back to the initial state.
- If you do a factory reset, you can restore your backup as a whole and see if that works. If the difficulty persists, then you have to consider that the app might need more RAM, or that it is incompatible with the OS version. You should try to upgrade the app in case it has compatibility issues.
Some problems occur due to compatibility issues. There are instances when an app gets updated, and the resulting update no longer works with the current Android version. Sadly, this does happen. Other instances occur due to conflicts between apps. This is not supposed to happen, however, with a large number of Android apps, there is no real testing for this kind of problem.
For most problems, a factory reset is an ultimate solution. If that does not work, then it might be time to bring your cellphone to a cellphone repair technician near you.
