Having a smartphones in our pockets is kind of a super power, allowing us to search for things on the internet, get directions, listen to music, make phone calls, and even invest in the stock market using things like the Robin Hood app. A result of this, however, is that most people don’t turn their phones off – ever.
Restarting your phone gives it the opportunity to refresh applications and other software. Restarting every couple of weeks can keep your phone working quickly and glitch-free, and it’s especially helpful for power users.
Put simply, turning your phone off – or even your computer for that matter – gives the hardware and software a chance to reset performance. For example, if you’ve ever found yourself tossing and turning at night and looking at your iPhone, you may notice that some of the apps are updating while you sleep. This is just your phone’s way of keeping everything up to date and running smoothly. The restart can lock the effects of this automatic maintenance in.
How Restarting Your Phone Can Increase Performance
We’ve covered how restarting your phone can fix this or that issue on the iPhone at length. from fixing screen blurriness to clearing issues with charging, to solving TrueDepth camera problems, this is a truly flexible troubleshooting step.
But how does restarting actually fix these things? What’s happening in the phone?
Clearing Out the RAM
One of the reasons why re-starting your phone even when there aren’t any glitches or errors has to do with RAM, which is an acronym for random-access memory. RAM is basically a computer’s or a phone’s short-term memory, and a lot of the data is stored in this particular part of the device’s CPU.
Modern phones, such as the iPhone 12 (on Amazon), are capable of managing this and moving data around when needed. When you restart your phone, RAM gets emptied out. The RAM being cleared keeps random bits of data from piling up and causing problems. Restarting your phone will close open apps, and it will help to get rid of anything that’s a drain on your battery.
How Restarting your Phone Can Fix Glitches
Whenever you have a glitch–when an app just won’t work right, or your GPS seems like it’s not accurate–you can restart your phone to fix the issue. Your phone can start acting up for many different reasons, but primarily it’s because every update, page loaded, and app installed on your phone adds and removes code, which after a while, can cause issues if it doesn’t have a chance to reset.
Giving your phone a quick rest can help to get your phone functioning normally again. Nowadays, we depend on our smartphones for many things in our lives. Many people use their smartphones for the things that we used to use computers for twenty years ago. The average person has 60 to 90 apps on their phone and employs about 25 of them per month.
When you go back to your phone’s home screen, that doesn’t actually close the app all the way. Instead, it’s running in the background, so it’s quicker to open the next time you use it. While always having apps open and ready to use is quick and convenient for smartphone users, it takes up your phone’s power, memory, and computing resources.
Over time, this can cause glitches, battery life issues, and eventually needing to get a new phone. By powering off your phone every so often, you can extend the life of your smartphone and save yourself money in the long term because you won’t be replacing your phone as often. Not only that, but it’s just going to make your device work a lot better because the RAM isn’t being eaten up as much by recently completed tasks.
How Often Should You Restart Your Phone?
With all that in mind, smartphones are advanced enough that they can run efficiently without you needing to power down your phone. As we’ve discussed elsewhere on the site, some people suggest powering down your phone and letting it rest at least a minute about once a week, but there are a few factors that determine whether or not you should even bother with this.
For example, it really should depend on how much you use your phone. If you are on your phone all the time, once a week may be a good idea, but most people would be fine with restarting their phones every two weeks. And of course, you should always restart if your phone seems to be having any kind of glitch.
A good rule of thumb is to just turn your phone off whenever you don’t plan on using it for a long period of time, for example, when you sleep, that way you won’t have to worry about buying it outright or using a plan like we’ve talked about before. This will have the added benefit of not only allowing the phone to update and refresh all of the apps and software, but it’s also going to be much easier on the battery which isn’t meant to be in use 100% of the time, especially if it’s plugged in and fully charged.
What About Other Options For Clearing Faults
If you’ve got some issue here and the restart didn’t fix it, you can try some other tricks. Note that restarting is different from resetting your iPhone, or triggering “Recovery Mode.” You may need to try clearing System data, or doing some general housekeeping on app and browser cache. These options are still different from resetting the Network Settings on your iPhone, which you may need to clear WiFi connection issues.
No matter what, just know there are other routine cleaning operations like restarting you should be aware of, and we have guides on all of them right here as iPhone experts ready to walk you through it all!
Restart Your Phone Automatically
For Android devices that came out after 2015, there is an automatic restart option so that you don’t even have to remember to restart your phone every couple of weeks. If you own an Android device like the Samsung Galaxy S20 (on Amazon), you may not have noticed this option because, in the Settings menu, it’s located within the Backup and Reset option, which most smartphone users may not have seen unless they were looking to factory reset their phone.
Setting up the automatic restart option on your Android is simple. Go to the Backup and Reset submenu in your settings. Under the Device Management option is Auto Restart. You can toggle the button on and off. By default, the auto-restart is set for 3:00 AM on Mondays, but you can change the date and time to suit your preferences.
As of now, there is no option for an automatic restart for iPhones, but it’s always possible this may be a feature that gets added to new software updates. As it was noted above already, just take the time to restart your phone every once in a while and everything will work just fine. Better yet, turn it off while you’re sleeping.
Conclusion
Our smartphones have become an essential part of our daily lives, so we like to keep them running smoothly. Restarting your smartphone every couple of weeks is a great idea to prevent any glitches. This will increase your phone’s dependability and keep it running for the long-term, saving you a lot of time, headache, and money in the end.