RESOLVING A FREEZING PHONE
What Causes a Phone to Freeze?
There are several reasons why an iPhone, Android, or another smartphone might freeze. The culprit may be a slow processor, insufficient memory, or a lack of storage space. There may be a glitch or a problem with the software or a particular app, the cause will reveal itself with the corresponding fix. Other times, a basic troubleshooting step may fix the problem without revealing the cause.
How to Fix Your Freezing Phone
Follow these steps, in order, to get your smartphone working properly again.
- Force restart your phone
Why smartphones freeze most time is because there are too many background processes. In addition, sometimes, your phone might not be able to handle the task thrown at it, therefore causing the screen to feel unresponsive. Nonetheless, rebooting your device should be handy here.
If the standard restart does not help, simultaneously press and hold the power and volume down keys for more than seven seconds, this will force your phone to restart.
If you have a phone with a removable battery, you can pull out the battery instead.
Meanwhile, if you own an iPhone, hold the Power + Volume down buttons at the same time until you see the Apple logo
- Free up phone storage
One of the common reasons phone freezes is lack of storage space. Your device needs some storage space to store temporary system and app files when needed.
To keep your device running as expected, you recommend you have at least 500MB – 1GB of available internal storage. However, you can unfreeze your phone by clearing up your storage space.
Start by checking what storage space is left on your device. Then, move to delete unnecessary files, apps, and others, to free up the storage space.
Here is how:
- Fire up your device Settings
- Scroll down a bit and hit
- Click on Internal shared storage or whatever it is been called on your device.
- From there, check, the tab for “Available” If it’s less than 1GB, we recommend you clear up some space.
- Uninstall rarely used apps
- Uninstalling rarely used apps can also help you unfreeze your phone. We install many apps on our phones only to find out we do not need them anymore after using them for the first time. However, having too many apps on your phone may slow down the performance.
- Still on how to fix a frozen phone, we recommend you uninstall all the apps you are not using. Doing so will free up your phone’s memory and create space for the needed processes.
- Open your app drawer.
- Find an app you rarely use.
- Long-press the app’s icon and tap
- Do the same to uninstall all the apps you do not need on your phone.
- After that, restart your device to see if it no longer freeze.
- Perform a factory reset if your phone is still frozen
If you cannot get your phone to turn on after it was frozen, a factory reset may fix your problem. Keep in mind that factory resetting your phone will erase all data on the phone, so this works best if you have created a backup already. Its advisable you have cloud back-ups also like: OneDrive and Dropbox.
However, as long as you have data synced to your Google account, such as your contacts, emails, and other data, you will be able to restore that even if you do not have a backup.
Follow these steps to reset your device:
- Tap the Settings app
- Click on
- Select Reset options
- Tap Erase all data (factory reset)
- You may read what happens when you reset your device again on the page, then hit ERASE ALL DATA below the screen.
Confirm your password and wait until your device reboots.