Android How To: Why Do Apps Crash What Can You Do To Fix It

With a wide array of available applications on the market and all the exciting things that they can do, it’s not at all surprising that you might want to try them all. And if this is something you do frequently: install and uninstall apps – you might experience some occasional crashing, freezing and slowing down.

If you feel that your app (or maybe a number of them) are slowing down and crashing a bit too often, here are a few simple steps that can rid you of the inconvenience.

It’s All In The Cache

As you may have heard, your apps use cache to write things on your phone that they need to get quick access to (going back and forth to permanent storage would waste many more resources). Most later versions of Android will deal with cache automatically. So don’t think that you have to clean cache manually and often – that actually would be counter-productive, as the CPU will have to start from scratch. So clearing your cache daily is not the way to go.

However, when your app crashes frequently, the problem may lie in the temporary files stored in the cache. That’s when clearing it will be helpful. So here’s what you do:

•  Go to Settings>Apps
• Find the app in question, tap on it and choose “Clear Cache” option.

If you are still experiencing problems, try “Clear Data” (which will work the same way as uninstalling and installing the app).

There may be times when you feel that your device is slowing down, but you just can’t figure out which app is the culprit. In this case you have two options. You can clear the cache/data for all the apps manually, which, depending on the number of apps you have installed, could be a piece of cake or a long and tedious endeavor. The other option makes everything much simpler. You simply download App Cache Cleaner from Google Play Store and let the app do the work.

Know Your Culprits

For future cases, it may be really useful to know what apps are using the most CPU on your phone, as they will become your number one suspects for slowing down your device. To get access to this information, you can (once more) simply download an app, like Watchdog Lite. Watchdog will allow you to see exactly how much CPU is being used by a particular application and send you alerts if one of them seems to be using way too much – an easy and simple way to keep track of your phone’s performance.  For more advanced info you can go to the developer options from the main settings menu and enable the CPU usage overlay.

For more help on Android (and other) matters refer to our How To Section.