Why is my phone slow and lag after 3 years of use? - Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

ok, so this is a noobish sounding query I know. but I really am puzzled as to why my Samsung Note 2 after 3 years of use have turned extremely slow and laggy on start up, app launches, chrome browsing and even typing on swiftkey.
on a computer, I might reasonably expect to defrag hdd or stop programs at startup. But mobile phones use SSD and they have fast seek times. My phone will lag even after the phone start up period, the period where one might reasonably expect it to be a bit slower. I thought it was because I was running out of space on the phone's internal drive, which I was (it was only 16gb), so I installed SD Maid and deleted about 7 gb worth of files (most of which was gallery pic thumnails and gallery pictures, which I have both deleted. Now I have no photos or vids on internatl memory and hence no thumbnails. But phone is still slow. I uninstalled a lot of apps and again used SD Maid to hunt down abandoned files and folder not uninstalled properly etc but no difference.
Is it because the phone's internal flash drive is degrading? or what?

Its typical on samsung phones or all phones in general, the apps get updates. they need more cpu power/ram, and the phones gets slow
and due to samsung's touchwiz, its extremely laggy after few years

Related

Defrag sd card

Just wondering if anyone has done this? I had my sd card in a reader on my pc, moving some photos around... for craps and giggles, I decided to defrag the card. Wow! It is reading alot faster. I was having some lag, pulling up photos, movies, and documents, now it is lightning fast.
Just wanted to share.:thumbup::beer:
Sent from my Galaxy S3
Basically a ssd or memory card does not need to be defraged because data is read in a different manner duo to not having moving parts which defragmentation has no impact on speed.
But i exprienced some speed problems while recording video on my nokia 5730xm and video got laggy which by defraging memory card the problem would b solved.
Anyway, Defragging these memories will reduce their lifetime very much.
But there is apps like android defrag or disk defragmenter on play store.
Sent from my GT-I9300 using xda app-developers app
defragment is needed only for hdds with spindles(it moves to fetch your data). not required for ssd or sd cards as it dosent have one. having said that. i defraged my sd once in pc and strangely i felt things were much faster than before. o_0
Well...this was an old sd card that I had in a previous phone, and whenever I had it in my phone..the gallery and media player had terrible lag. Like I said..I just tried it, and was shocked at the result. Way faster.
:beer:
Sent from my Galaxy S3
It has more to do with the way the data read from the card is cached by the respective OS reading it than anything else. The data might appear fragged, but it's technically not, since all the sectors on an sd card are essentially equal, unlike a spindle drive.
Even i didn't believe this. But defragging SD Card surely helps. I guess defragging groups the data so it can be fetched easily.
just a question, ....isn't sqlite data base vacuuming a similar process?

Opinion: Phones without a SD slot

Opinion: I have noticed that a few Android phones like the HTC One S are designed without a microSD slot. I think this is a really bad idea for both the microSD slotless phones themselves and Android as a whole. I would suggest that consider this when buying any phone without a microSD slot because every phone bought without one is a vote that says microSD is dispensable. Obviously the ultimate choice is yours.
In the future if unlimited plans become the norm and Android develops enough that on-line files can be cataloged and accessible just like they were on a microSD card, then microSD may become obsolete ....... those days are not here yet. I would gladly pay Dropbox to store all my music files on line, but playing them from on-line is rudimentary at best. PowerAMP or the Stock Android player can't catalog the files so finding and playing them is a mess. There is also no cover art or lyric support either. Also if every file must be cataloged and that means downloading the whole music collection one, at a time which would take weeks.
In my opinion, the direction Android should be going in is providing a decent sized non-removable memory block built into the phone to run the OS and store Apps, at least 16GB. This way the memory access in uniform, quick and direct with none of the quirks that SD cards exhibit. The microSD card should be completely isolated from the operating system except to provide simple removable storage like a flash drive. The micoSD card slot should also be on the outside of the phone so it could be swapped out live.
I think that at least with Froyo, moving apps to the SD card didn't work well. Some Apps worked OK, but eventually almost every app had some problem or another. Some apps also caused errors that resulted in read only access or worse.
Unlimited plans are going away, I doubt they will make a comeback. With data becoming more and more expensive now, the cloud is becoming a more impractical storage model. I hope Android phone makers keep microSD slots around as I will not buy a phone without a microSD slot. Unfortunately this means passing on the last generation of Nexus devices.
On phones with enough internal space the external SD card is mounted separately and some internal memory is mounted as a virtual SD card. This allows apps to be installed on the phone's virtual SD card so you can remove the external.
For me personally as long as there's 16GB on the phone, I have no need for more. I suspect the majority (60-65%) are also the same as they dont use much space at all. There should really be a poll on this.
I've done without the microSD slot for 2 years on my Nexus S and I don't really miss it. Music Storage? with Google Music's 20,000 song storage, how can you not use it in some way? Half my music is on Google Music and my hot playlist/albums are on my phone. The only thing i find that's really taking up all the space are the games.
16gb is enough for me. I find 32gb and above too much.
I need more than 16. With my current phone I have a single gb of internal storage for my apps, 10gb on my sd card, another 3gb for root stuff (ROMs, backups, titanium backups), and then another gigabyte of pictures and app data. Since I don't get to access all of my SDcard, I've only got 400mb left
I would keep SD cards. Sure solid block memory is nice, but I think SD would be more handy, and much cheaper.
Sent from my Inspire 4G using xda app-developers app
I have 16gb internal , and a 16 gb sd, and I need more. Having no sd card slot is not acceptable, and the reason I don't buy nexus devices, or the one series HTC devices.
Sent from my HTC_Amaze_4G using xda app-developers app
I was in your position as well.
Love the design of the One S, but the lack of an SD card made me chose the GSIII.
I bought the 16GB version and threw a 16GB SD card in.
This is what I have used in terms of memory.
Internal:
- 8.44GB available, 520MB to apps, 502MB to pictures
External:
- 6.25GB available, 7.02GB songs (1700 songs), 243.2MB Backups
I think you should gage what kind of things that you keep on your devices.
For me, it's clear that I needed an external card, you might not.
i would be okay without an sd slot if the phone had 32 or 64 gigs of internal storage.
an sd card slot is needed now a days. Even with cloud based music and such, what about the times when you can't grab stuff from the cloud? Like flights, areas with very poor signal (the gym for me) or other such things. I don't see why they can't give that option as a standard or given. I'd be happy with 16gig internal and an SD card slot, but without the slot i can't keep all my music on the phone itself. I don't want to have to rely on streaming with the cloud to listen to music, and with games and apps these days requiring more space where is that all going to go? Some games download an extra few gigs, so 8gigs will fill up really quick.
There is no reason not to give phones an sd card slot, its a big con in my book. Unless the phone has 32 gig or better yet 64 gig internal storage.
I don't see a problem with not having an SD card.
I've easily got by with my HTC desire with an 8GB SD card.
Sometimes I think people keep things for the sake of it.
For example I was keeping nandroid backups from 6-8months ago
I keep about 500 songs a load of apps/games.
If I want any more music I've got cloud. I've never got the notion of carrying around 1500+ songs.
At 3.5 minutes a song that's 87+ hours worth of music. Who the hell has the time.
Sent from my HTC Desire using xda app-developers app
Until smartphones start coming out with 64GB and 128GB options, I will continue buying phones that have removable SD.
Even then, I still like the idea of a removable storage device for things like backups, sharing music, photos, etc...
Sent from my SPH-D710 using xda premium
From the OP ..... It seems like a number of people are happy with storing their music on-line. As an avid DropBox user I can see the charms of on-line storage for some type of files, like documents.
However music files just do not currently lend themselves to on-line storage primarily because it doesn't really matter how many files you can store on-line if they are slow to get to and are un-cataloged.
When music is on a microSD card, the default Android music player or PowerAmp does a very good job of cataloging them, and you have album art and for PowerAmp lyrics too. Both are very slick and it is very easy to generate playlists or find exactly the file you want. No on-line service can play files ever close to as easily and elegantly as default Android music player or PowerAmp can when files are on micro SD.
If on-line playing of tracks were as good an experience as microSD, I would be the first to use it as there are some limited advantages.
microSD for music provides the very best music experience AND it is 2 year old technology. This elegant working technology is being removed from new phones and being replaced with something much more complicated, slower, more inaccessible with greatly reduced functionality.
It is not a good direction for Android
Just remember that a few short years ago almost every single phone was completely locked down and most wouldn't ever turn on unless a activated carrier SIM card was present. My HTC Desire Z worked quite well without any SIM card except for making calls. Android was the biggest breath of fresh air I have seen in the phone industry, and I see the premature removal of microSD and nonremovable battery as the 1st step towards Apple's model and the bad old days when your phone so clearly belonged to the carrier and not you.
Sirandar said:
Just remember that a few short years ago almost every single phone was completely locked down and most wouldn't ever turn on unless a activated carrier SIM card was present. My HTC Desire Z worked quite well without any SIM card except for making calls. Android was the biggest breath of fresh air I have seen in the phone industry, and I see the premature removal of microSD and nonremovable battery as the 1st step towards Apple's model and the bad old days when your phone so clearly belonged to the carrier and not you.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Don't worry, with the amount of OEMs out there that make android devices, there will always be somebody willing to add microSD slots to their phones to get sales. Most OEMs still do include them, its really only the Nexus devices that don't include them.
To throw my 2 cents in here.
The mobile phones developed fast these few years but people still think that they should trade music player, PC, and a game console for 1 phone.
I don't think phones were made for constant use of music games and other things because the battery inside of them are still weak and the Android phones were made just for CASUAL listening to music and gaming it SHOULDN'T replace your MP3 player or gaming console.
I myself have a 16 GB MP3 player with me that can endure playing for over 25 hours (more than enough for 2 days)
As for the photos i have a Dropbox (18 GB), Sugarsync (over 24 GB) and Box (50 GB) and 2 of them (Dropbox and Sugarsync) have a automatic upload for pictures so whenever i snap a picture its automatically uploaded to the cloud and in settings you can change if you would only like to uplodad trough Wi-Fi and Data or Wi-Fi alone and if you don't trust cloud (for privacy) you can buy an app called FolderSync that can sync your photos to your NAS, FTP server and even to the clouds (Box) on a schedule like every hour or at specific time (at 3 AM while you are asleep).
And the app also support for 1 way or 2 way Sync so if you just do 1 way you can delete all the pictures on your phone but they won't be deleted on your server/cloud.
So i'm pretty good with my HTC Evo 3D with ONLY 8GB storage and i have 3 GB of data per month and as technology grows so do Wi-Fi hotspots and almost everywhere there is a Wi-Fi Hotspot near you.
So i don't see any problem with 16/32 GB storage without SD card slot and will probably get myself a Nexus 4 soon (after i save some money lol).
From the OP to Hreidmar
I can agree that PCs and Laptops are not going to be replaced by smartphones for a long time yet. Quite simply PCs and laptops can do things that are inconvenient or impossible on a smartphone. Games on the phone are cute and have their charms but phones dont have the power, depth or screen space to run a game like Skyrim (Sadly the plot of that game could fit into a small corner of a smartphone )
However, for anyone who carries a decent smartphone, MP3 players are obsolete. They were obsolete the second Froyo Phones (or Iphones) hit the market and microSD hit 32Gb.
My deceased HTC Desire Z and a 32Gb microSD card together made an astoundingly good MP3 player that was always there because my phone was always with me. All I needed to carry was a small pair of decent earbuds.
32 GB of storage was just enough storage to cover a good sized music collection at 96kps Ogg. You may ask " Why would you want to carry around your entire music collection?" I would reply, "Why wouldn't you want to, do you really like syncing and leaving half your music at home"
The standard augment is that you couldn't possibly listen to 32Gb of music on the road. This isn't about the number of tracks. It is about playing the exact track you want, when you want it, spontaneously and easily. It is also about never ever having to sync tracks again except when you buy some new ones. It is about freedom of choice and freedom from syncing. This freedom was already here 2 years ago.
The combination of Android ICS or JB with a 32, 64 or 128Gb microSD card is a perfect MP3 player. The Android Stock player is great and you can search through and make playlists effortlessly. The audio system on the HTC One S is also great AND your phone is always with you. It is a WIN WIN WIN except that the big phone makers are crippling their phone with no microSD slot and puny 10Gb of storage.
To put it in perspective, I bought a 32Gb flash drive for 10$ and the actual chip is even less expensive. Apple is gouging end users for storage to subsidize the rest of the phone. micro SD lets the cost per GB float closer to reality.
Hreidmar said:
To throw my 2 cents in here.
The mobile phones developed fast these few years but people still think that they should trade music player, PC, and a game console for 1 phone.
I don't think phones were made for constant use of music games and other things because the battery inside of them are still weak and the Android phones were made just for CASUAL listening to music and gaming it SHOULDN'T replace your MP3 player or gaming console.
I myself have a 16 GB MP3 player with me that can endure playing for over 25 hours (more than enough for 2 days)
As for the photos i have a Dropbox (18 GB), Sugarsync (over 24 GB) and Box (50 GB) and 2 of them (Dropbox and Sugarsync) have a automatic upload for pictures so whenever i snap a picture its automatically uploaded to the cloud and in settings you can change if you would only like to uplodad trough Wi-Fi and Data or Wi-Fi alone and if you don't trust cloud (for privacy) you can buy an app called FolderSync that can sync your photos to your NAS, FTP server and even to the clouds (Box) on a schedule like every hour or at specific time (at 3 AM while you are asleep).
And the app also support for 1 way or 2 way Sync so if you just do 1 way you can delete all the pictures on your phone but they won't be deleted on your server/cloud.
So i'm pretty good with my HTC Evo 3D with ONLY 8GB storage and i have 3 GB of data per month and as technology grows so do Wi-Fi hotspots and almost everywhere there is a Wi-Fi Hotspot near you.
So i don't see any problem with 16/32 GB storage without SD card slot and will probably get myself a Nexus 4 soon (after i save some money lol).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
From the OP => Google Music
When I complained about the lack of microSD and tiny amounts of storage space on my HTC One S,a number of people pointed me to Google Music
As a Canadian I can't use the service to upload music. It isn't going to come to Canada in the foreseeable future either IMO, or Amazon MP3 would be already available.
Looking at it trying out the parts I could I think that Google Music may be a viable solution to accessing decent size music collections on a smartphone on the go.
Advantages: It seems to be able to catalog the tracks and give the end used an experience similar to having local music files on a SD card.
Disadvantages:
1) No data connect no music. Google tries to fix this by caching frequently used music, but chance are the track you want to play won't be available when the is no signal or you are forced to turn data off.
2) Data charges: An MP3 is fairly big and constantly playing tracks will add up to significant usage. A 2GB plan would probably make this irrelevant.
3) The music data is streamed. Streamed data means there may be dropouts and stutter if there high internet traffic volume. Downloading the whole track at once may be better.
4) Google is giving end users a large cloud space to upload tracks for free. However it is quite obvious that Google is only doing this to mine metrics about what type of music serious appreciators of music listen too so they can populate their music store with music. Once Google gets its data the free storage
will probably end or be replaced by paid storage. I personally wouldn't mind paying for the convenience of accessing files on-line as long as it is cheap and the data transfer rates are high.
Lastly, I would still much much more prefer to store all my music locally on a microSD. It is so much simpler, robust and fast.
Heck... Pics, vids, tunes... I have to have an SD to keep me going. Currently have 16g on the phone and a 32g SD card. There is no way I'd buy a phone without a SD slot!

Chrome keeps refreshing

Chrome tab keep refreshing. Seems like lollipop is keeping much lesser process in memory. It is kind of frustrating as half way through writing this post, i switched to do something else, when i switch back, everything gone. Anyone encounter this?
Yeah, even on the Tab S 10.5 with 3GB of RAM, it does the same.
Overly aggressive memory management is to blame.
Google tries to optimize chrome for devices with as little as 512MB of RAM. Unfortunately, we are the ones who pay the price.
Dr. Hurt said:
Yeah, even on the Tab S 10.5 with 3GB of RAM, it does the same.
Overly aggressive memory management is to blame.
Google tries to optimize chrome for devices with as little as 512MB of RAM. Unfortunately, we are the ones who pay the price.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This has been happening for a while, so now I use a different browser. Very impressed with lightning browser! Very fast!
Sent from my Nexus 9
Hmmm, but chrome on my Sony z2 or older nexus device like both the 7 seems to be OK. Feel more lollipop issue rather den chrome cos when press Home screen button sometime will also refresh the wallpaper.
I'm seeing the same issue. My N7 on KK doesn't do what you're describing. I haven't noticed, yet, if my N5 on L also refreshes. It sucks, too, because if was reading an article from one page in a different tab, the original page will reload and start back at the top.
I've been experiencing the same thing with chrome beta viewing ingress website then ingress app.
Sent from my SM-N900V using XDA Free mobile app
Killing Me!!!!!
Because of thd work I do online, this one bug/feature is making my Nexus 9 unusable for me.. And since I already gave away my Nexus 7, that puts me in quite a pickle. I thought I was OK, but I didn't count on something so silly popping up.
I really hope Google doesn't ignore this like they do with most bugs that they consider features. This us pretty bad abd would have been reason enough for me not to get the Nexus 9... at least not yet.
Try chrome beta. It doesnt refresh on my n5 or n9.
Unfortunately this is a problem that I doubt will be fixed, IMO this device needs 3 gigs of ram, as android in general is using quite a bit more ram on the 9 than the 5 and 7, plus you permanently lose another 128mb for nvidias code optimization for CPU. 64 bit CPUs can address more ram but 64 bit apps and OS's consume more ram. The n9 is almost always in a low or critical memory state, check yourself in developer options / process stats. The 5 and 7 spend minutes or seconds in critical state over a 24 hour period, the 9 spends hours in this state. There is a reason google used swap on the device- no other nexus device uses. The nexus 6 doesnt- but they gave it 3 gigs, and its not even 64 bit. With just a few things open chrome can't even handle 2 tabs. Its really kinda sad, it almost breaks this device for me- it ruins what I use the device for.
Start reading at around post 32 or something here:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/nexus-9/general/nexus-9-1-passmark-t2957603/page4
Maybe I'm wrong and there is HUGE memory leaks in lollipop, but its only showing up on the 9. I doubt it though.

[Q] System memory requirements

Hi to all you knowledgeable people. Some assistance and general clarification would be great on this, please.
The story starts with my wife's phone. I don't think that the model etc is important for this question, but it is an LG F60 (or something like that) and it is nearly new. The phone only has 4GB of memory so I made sure that I bought a good size SD card to go with it and I have set the OS to use the card for all media files. This seem to be working as all photos and music etc. are on the SD and there is nothing memory hungry on the internal mem. She has had the unit for a week or so and added perhaps 3 apps + those that were there as part of the out of the box config and now the thing is full - really! So I have a look at the memory usage and see - total 4GB - some apps and some bits and bobs 1.4GB - 'other' 2.44GB. When you drill down 'other' is almost all something called ‘system data’. So the first and simple question is this - does the android OS really need ~2.5 GB out of the box with little use, or have we done something wrong / ill advised? [BTW there are no backups locally, they are remote through a google account]
I connected the device to the PC to try to diagnose the situation. So the Internal storgae is reporting 60MB free of 1.32GB. This implies that 1.32 is all that we had to play with at all which would point towards the fact that the other 2.44 is correct for the OS. There is a folder called android which has ~25MB of data in it but nothing sizable elsewhere on the viewable internal storage space.
Out of interest I have connected a 7" android tablet to the PC to see if this reports the same sort of usage. This is showing 4.3 free from 5.5 total. This is an 8gb device so again this would suggest that 2.5 is used for system, which supports my initial fears.
If it does take 2.5GB just to provide a UI then is it wise or ethical for manufactures to sell devices with this little memory. Who would have thought that we would be suffering from memory issues in 2014 when a 32GB SD costs the price of a sandwich and a drink. I really am struggling with this whole concept. I mean an Ipad cost a lot of money and yet you have to choose to get the one with 32GB rather than 16GB even though the difference probably costs the company literally pence (if anything) - what is going on? My son had to remove loads of things from his ipad to even update the OS to the latest version - it just all seems soooo very crazy to me. With 4GB memory these phones are coming to the market and they are barely fit for purpose. You can buy a laptop these days (for not too much, a few hundred at most) and basically you can just sit and chuck data at it for years before you have any storage problem. Yes - I do understand the dif between a hard disk and RAM (it is called something else now I guess), but even so, these whole tablet industry is seriously flawed by this design limitation IMO. To add to this fact that it is made difficult to transfer data to and from ipads (less so android I realise) and they don't have an expansion slot, their popularity seems a fantastic mystery to me.
Anyway rant over - can somebody help me to understand the phone issue and how I might go about moving the OS onto the card or something of that kind which might improve the situ.
Thanks,
I have the same problem with this phone.

Overall love

Yes, yes, it's possible to love a phone. Heck, you sleep next to it, don't you? Rate this thread to indicate your love for the Samsung Galaxy J2, all things considered. A higher rating indicates that the Samsung Galaxy J2 is an incredible phone that you enjoy tremendously. You love it.
Then, drop a comment if you have anything to add!
Sayah ingin hp sayah lebih baik
Samsung galaxy J2 was the worst mistake I ever did in my life while buying. It's so f bad I was frustrated from the first day. I don't know who the heck thought that preinstalling f big microsoft office apps in that 8GB device would do any good. I swear to god no other device made me so frustrated. When I got the device and completed all the steps I was ready to use it so I installed whatsapp and truecaller and a notification came for updating all the apps so I did and when the update and all completed the next notification to pop up was DEVICE STORAGE FULL. Now for those who are thinking whatsapp must have taken up the space let me tell you it was just 12 MB and other files where roughly 30-40 MB. The microsoft apps where each 150-200 MB and they cannot be uninstalled. Gallery is the worst as it won't display any images if storage shortage shows up and if you still delete images and all videos thinking that it will be resolved you will be left with very few images. I am literally frustated with the very first of use. I am very very disappointed.
First of all, I would like to make it clear that I own a J2 Prime (SM-G532M), not the common J200 model (both are very similar anyway).
If you are not into mid/high-level android stuff, this phone will be just useless. Its low internal storage space, in addition with its ridiculous amount of pre-installed apps, make this phone frustrating and not suitable for an average user. Its internal storage gets full with only three social media apps installed and a couple of files, however, if you root the phone and get it a proper SD card, you can make it count. The quad-core 1.4 GHz processor, plus the 1.5 GB of RAM, the 8MP and 5MP cameras and the Mali GPU are pretty decent for a mid-end device. I can play PUBG and similar games without a problem, and with the proper apps you can transfer the app data to the SD card, so storage does not become an issue. Also, you can delete system and preloaded apps with Root Explorer or similar apps, and there are already custom ROMs for this device.
I hope this review to be useful for somebody.
J2 2018 J250F
Absolutely love this phone
No lags, good updated UI but thr camera sucks
More than I could expect from about $130

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