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What causes Android smartphone lag? (and how to fix them)

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.

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Too many running apps that hog your memory

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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Avatar for Carl Lamiel

Get in touch with Carl at @lamielcarl on Twitter or visit his website for more updates!

55 Responses

  1. Avatar for lol lol says:

    its sad that a tech blog like yugatech is advocating the use of ram cleaners and antivirus apps, which often provide unnecessary strain to devices than do good.

    there is little chance malware can affect your device if you only download apps from the play store.

    and why would you even dignify the browser prompt in no.5? it misleads people into thinking their phone actually has a virus, when the browser prompt is most likely only a link for adware. so they download an antivirus app which further slows their device. very disappointing.

    • Avatar for Carl Lamiel Carl Lamiel says:

      It’s always up to the readers’ discretion if they want to follow our solutions; that’s the reason why we laid out the comments as a channel to provide additional input.

      1. Greenify is a great tool to hibernate your apps. Really helped my phone’s performance when I was still using my old phone. We’re not advocating RAM cleaners, we laid out steps in manually stopping your apps.
      2. The image in #5 is only used to visualize the scenario. You can tweak the antivirus settings to prevent it from hogging too much RAM, or you may uninstall it after scanning. There are still apps in the play store that actually provide malware once you download and use them.

    • Avatar for .|. .|. says:

      @Carl – really? like what app from Playstore are you referring to that includes malware? can you name some?

    • Avatar for Lloyd Dunamis Lloyd Dunamis says:

      @.|.: http://www.yugatech.com/mobile/two-play-store-apps-secretly-mine-cryptocurrency/
      Of course, there were more malwares that successfully got in to Google Play that doesn’t exist in the store now, however there can be another one coming, if malware writers happened to find a hole in their security.

  2. Avatar for justsaying justsaying says:

    isa lang naman solution dyan! DON’T BUY ANDROID PHONES!

  3. Avatar for Androidlag Androidlag says:

    Need pa talaga ng android na soooobrang taas ng specs na hardware bago di mag lag. Hahahahha…

  4. Avatar for iOS forever iOS forever says:

    KAWAWA NAMAN MGA ANDROID USERS. KABISADUHIN NYO YANG GUIDE HA ? KAHIT MGA OCTA CORE KAYO LAG PA RIN MGA ANDROID NYO.

  5. Avatar for marc marc says:

    Android phones aren’t SMART phones. All this work for something that should be handled automatically by the OS?

  6. Avatar for abuzalzal abuzalzal says:

    In Samsung Android devices, there’s only one thing that causes lag – it doesn’t matter whether you have a flagship device or an entry-level one. It’s called TouchWiz.

  7. Avatar for someguy someguy says:

    Hindi niyo na kailangan gawin lahat yan…

    THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY IS…

    TURN OFF ALL ANIMATION!

    I-set niyo lahat sa off or lowest possible settings. Nasa developer options ito sa settings. Kung meron yung app na animation, i-off niyo din.

    Hindi ko naiintindihan kung bakit may pa memory memory pa ang mga ibang tao. Eh eto lang naman ang nagpapa lag. Wag na mag install pa ng mga cleaner at mag add lang kayo ng another resource.

  8. Avatar for ram ram says:

    memory cleaners tsk tsk. linux/unix and similar OSes use memory differently than windows.

    http://www.linuxhowtos.org/System/Linux%20Memory%20Management.htm

  9. Avatar for _montz _montz says:

    dont use ram cLeaners, it will cause to Load your apps more Laggy .. as the ram is mostLy consumed, android will automatically kill some processes to gain space for others .. so there is no need for shitty ram cleaners .. most specially if u are just using free versions of it .. u’ll then be flooded with annoying advertisements that consumes ur mobile data abnormally and drastically make ur phone more Laggy

  10. Avatar for Vekou X Aitenshi Vekou X Aitenshi says:

    What some people don’t understand is that the Android OS is built with no specific hardware in mind. Whereas Apple programmed iOS to be exclusively used by their proprietary hardware. This would mean that for Android to run on multiple hardware configurations, certain program checks will be incorporated before executing a program instruction. Aside from that, 3rd party vendors modify the open-source code and install bloatwares which further slows down the OS. Also, most of them install their own launcher or UI, which gives a pleasant eye-candy look upon launching the phone, but performs terribly at that, replacing the fast-bare-bone UI of stock Android. The lag is most noticeable in 3rd party launchers which makes most people declares that Android is slow and lags a lot.

  11. Avatar for cnongnanaimo cnongnanaimo says:

    I use Clean Master to get rid of junk files, free up memory and therefore boost my phone’s performance. It also has a function to manage autostarting apps.
    Di ako bayad diyan ha. There are other similar apps naman.

  12. Avatar for RaGe RaGe says:

    antivirus apps are somewhat not useful enough since Android is “sandboxed”

    for me Google Play Services’ internal “services” causes tremendous wakelocks, CPU usage and battery drains

    I root them, use Xposed Framework, install Amplify and Greenify for wakelocks then the Disable Service app for disabling unnecessary “services” within your apps.

  13. Avatar for Easy E Easy E says:

    There are RAM cleaners out there but they do harm actually. Read this: http://www.phonearena.com/news/Here-are-10-types-of-Android-apps-you-should-absolutely-avoid_id65352

  14. Avatar for dothackjhe dothackjhe says:

    Meron na bang identified na virus sa Android? May notion kasi na virus-free pa yung Android (hence di na kailangan ng anti-virus installed) since Linux-based yung OS.

    • Avatar for accel accel says:

      No Operating System is malware-proof. As long as an operating system allows running code does not belong to it, it will always be vulnerable to malware.

      So much for the Linux fanboys out there who endlessly claim that their beloved OS is malware-proof and bashing Windows like they’re being enslaved by their master Linus Torvalds.

  15. Avatar for cnongnanaimo cnongnanaimo says:

    For low internal storage, (rooted devices) delete files in folders /data/core and /data/logs or data/log_other_mode. I already tried this on my phone and it works fine. No issues whatsoever.

  16. Avatar for June June says:

    Their are some tools naman to prevent lagging on ram and free up some memory from phone internal memory.
    E.G Clean Master or CCleaner. So far for my experience The CM is good and complete too from mobile security up to cleaning junk memory

  17. Avatar for Raphiduz Raphiduz says:

    That’s the problem with Android devices. Lag, freeze and restart of the unit are most common even with higher RAM. The main reason is this, the device and OS came from different companies. Meaning most of the apps are not tested to the units with different Andorid versions from Samsung, Alcatel, Sony, HTC, Cherry Mobile, O+, etc. Unlike with Apple, apps are being tested first to Apple devices before being approved and posted to the Apps Store. Thats why Apple users are very satisfied with the smoothness and without lag apps from their units. Mas sulit ang binayad mo sa Apple devices.

    • Avatar for BlackBerry Fan BlackBerry Fan says:

      I have never experienced any lag with my Blackberry z30. The problem with android phones is the OS itself, its resource hog. It runs on virtual machine, the Dalvic system. It virtualizes the graphical interface so that its easy for Google to port android across different hardwares, it short its not optimize for specific hardware thats why it needs HUGE Ram to run lag-free. Compare it to BlackBerry OS which is based on QNX kernel, the true REAL TIME OS. It doesn’t need virtualization whatsoever. Its so stable and you don’t need to reboot it from tme to time, I’m running my phone for almost a month now and i hvent rebooted it yet. To top it all, its the most secured OS to date.

  18. Avatar for Tony Tony says:

    First is delete or disable unnecessary preloaded apps. The only important google app for me is the google play and play services and the rest can be done with a browser. For important apps, gumagamit na lang ako ng alternative. Like facebook, I prefer the lite version. Though not that fluid but it is faster. Based on my experience, kung wala ka naman problem sa app or sa os mo, better na wag ka munang mag update, magbasa muna ng feedbacks kasi usually puro beta ang mga latest versions that leads to lag, crashing and a lot of issues.

  19. Avatar for Easy E Easy E says:

    Many apps has a special permission to run when the phone starts. Pero di mo naman kailangan palagi yung app. Sa windows OS (desktop – di ko alam kung may ganun sa phones) may built in tool para idisable ang mga apps na nagra-run pag start pa lang ng phone.

    Sa Android kailangan pa ng 3rd party app at yung iba kailangan rooted and phone.

  20. Avatar for owwell owwell says:

    ma-try nga

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