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Help Do I hate Android or Samsung?

J

jynx

Member
Ok so I have a whole bunch of questions about my phone. I am not pro Android or Apple. I just want a phone that works. Here are my issues.

Phone is a Samsung Galaxy S5
Service is Verizon

I have so many problems I want to know if it is a Samsung thing or an Android thing.

Problems:
Storage. I have a 32gb sd card but can barely put anything on it. I always get insufficient space warnings when opening email so I have to delete stuff to view emails. Can't update apps, etc.

Car mode. Randomly turns on by itself

Icons. Many icons are not there with just a generic Android symbol.

Apps crash all the time.

Phone is ridiculously slow.

Phone overheats.

Way too many programs for the same thing. I have messages and Verizon messages. Like 4 ways to open/edit photos. All different programs that all do the same thing and I can't delete the extras.

Weird functions. If I put my phone on silent it also silences my alarm. How can I sleep with notifications making noise? I want to have an alarm work with the phone on silent.

I want to know if these issues are bloat from Samsung or general Android issues?

I hate this phone. I am considering the new nexus as it is supposed to be pure Android. Will it solve my issues or should I go back to Apple? I have a stock phone and have no need to modify it.
 
Here are some screenshots
 

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Is this normal memory usage for doing pretty much nothing on the phone?
 

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Okay out of all the questions I'm going to start to with the no icons thing. You're getting that because you moved those apps to an sd card in settings and then took out the sd card and haven't replaced it, not android's fault, not really Samsung's, just know that if you're going to move apps to sd when you take away the sd card the apps won't start because part of them is on your sd card.
For the always being out of space you should try the useful Storage Truth app, it tells you how much space is readily available to you. Yes, full ram is good for android, that's how it functions well, and that screen is very deceiving on Samsung phones. It doesn't show what's taking how much memory, just recent apps.
A lot of those apps are definitely bloat, carriers love doing that, really no way around that, though you can always disable them in settings>applications>all
As for the overheating and sluggishness, you're on lollipop, my guess is you didn't factory reset after the update. I recommend booting into recovery and wiping cache first. Power off your phone and then press and hold the volume up, home and power buttons and when your phone vibrates let go of the power key and keep pressing the other two. then navigate to clear cache and select it with the home or power button (not quite sure which but it'll tell you) then scroll down to "reboot now" and reboot your device. If that doesn't help with the overheating you're going to want to back up anything important you have on your internal memory and this time factory reset from recovery.
 
Check out "RAM Truth" as well

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sa.ramtruth

Companion app to Storage Truth.

Built-in stuff is sometimes accurate, but usually not, they're just cartoons.

Check out "SystemPanelLite Task Manager" (but don't use it for a task killer)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nextapp.systempanel

Your phone was absolutely running more than one just one app when reporting 1.3 GB RAM used.

A lot more - and it's supposed to.

Stay away from nonsense apps -

http://androidforums.com/threads/pu...k-killers-ram-optimizers-and-the-like.896663/
 
Thanks for the responses. As far as the app icons I have never removed the sd card. The icons disappear at times and come back and disappear randomly. I will also try to reboot the phone.
 
"Your phone was absolutely running more than one just one app when reporting 1.3 GB RAM used."

I'm not that tech savvy but I closed all the apps and that's what it showed.
 
Then your sd card MIGHT be getting unmounted by itself, which ends up being a hardware problem (maybe I'm not really sure) but that's definitely not normal behavior not is it anything else. I've had Samsung's since 2.3.6 and those icons are what that means.

Also yes you closed SOME apps, but you'll never close all apps. While we're at it, you can close "apps" but a lot of processes and services (what makes those apps actually do anything) are always running in the background and taking up RAM.
 
jynx said:
"Your phone was absolutely running more than one just one app when reporting 1.3 GB RAM used."

I'm not that tech savvy but I closed all the apps and that's what it showed.
Click to expand...
As @Blu8 said - you exercised some options that led you to honestly expect and believe that.

This thread explains enough about actual running apps and Android to either shock you or put you to sleep -

http://androidforums.com/threads/pu...k-killers-ram-optimizers-and-the-like.896663/

Don't get drawn into the smoke and mirrors of app management.

Android already does it.

Most of the running app reports you'll see are not true.

Most of the memory use reports you see are not true.

System Panel, Storage Truth and RAM Truth don't lie.

The thread above explains how anyone with a little command line know-how can look at what the Linux kernel is saying because that's the incontrovertible truth.

As almost everyone else is into infotainment instead of the information you actually need, we developed the truth apps to give you the hard core Linux information in real time without requiring you to be a hard core Linux expert.

Infotainment is always trying to sell you something.

Information from an open source platform is free.
 
Try putting the SD card into a PC and see if you can read and write to it normally. If you get access errors there then that's your problem. With a bad SD card the phone will constantly be trying to access it and failing which can cause the slowness, crashing, missing apps and overheating.
Even if the card seems ok it might be a good idea to reformat it and start over with it, or try a totally different card in the phone (or no card temporarily) and see how it behaves.
My S5, while not on Verizon or 5.0, does not exhibit these problems and runs quite well. I do have it rooted and tweaked but even without doing that it would still be ok, just with the annoyances that rooting and tweaking have eliminated.
 
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