With use, you’re bound to start encountering a little lag on your smartphone, it almost unavoidable. Its however abnormal to have a crippling lag or overheating. Its even more abnormal if its persistent. let’s take a dive into this common issue and how you can make it a thing of the past.
What causes lagging?
Lagging points at an increase in work or bottlenecks your phone’s processor is encountering. A few reasons you might encounter a serious lag are:
- Low storage: When running low on storage space, your phone will start to struggle with saving or writing stuff
- Too many apps: More apps means more system resource being used up. It gets even worse when most of the apps auto start or are always in the background. Apps like Facebook are notorious data hogs. Bloatware (unneeded apps that ship with the phone) don’t exactly help matters
- RAM boosters and task managers: You’re probably surprised by this but the bulk of them are more of a nuisance and nowhere near helpful, they even hog system resources themselves
- Low RAM and Internal storage: If you’ve bought a low end smartphone then there’s a limit to how much juice you can get out of it due to its entry level specs
- Buggy OS: If you’re running on a buggy OS then you can only expect trouble. This is what makes custom ROMs appealing since they’re better optimized
- Expanding using SD card: Expanding your internal storage or RAM (especially with a low quality external SD card) will have a toll on your phone due to the constant read-write cycles
What causes overheating?
Overheating is more serious than lagging because it can damage internal components if not reigned in. While its normal for your smartphone to get a little warm during charge and intensive discharge, it shouldn’t get or stay hot. Some reasons your smartphone might overheat are:
- Faulty battery: If your battery is swollen, takes longer than usual to charge or discharges quickly, both charging and discharging efficiency will be affected, causing more current to get wasted (as heat)
- Radios: Your WiFi, Bluetooth, 4G (during lengthy downloads), 3G (during lengthy phone calls) and Hotspot sharing could lead to your device getting hot. The quality of the smartphone’s components and cooling system do play a part in how hot it gets but radios exert their toll all the same
- Faulty or resource-intensive app: Some apps push your smartphone to the limit whether due to their system requirements being high or the code being unoptimized. You’ll encounter this more often with games.
- Screen: Keeping your screen at maximum brightness at all times is one of the biggest battery drainers. A low quality display would heat up very quickly
How do I prevent my Android smartphone from lagging or overheating
To avoid or manage lagging, the rule of thumb is to keep your usage as light as possible. Close anything not in use and avoid doing too much at a time. Do a reboot if the lag gets really bad. If a reboot doesn’t help then consider a factory reset or flashing a factory firmware
To avoid or manage overheating, try to figure out what activities tend to cause the phone to heat up. This will help figure out if you’re dealing with a software or hardware source. If a given activity is causing your smartphone to overheat then pause it after a while to allow the phone cool
