Droid becoming unstable?

[dnorton]

I have first generation Motorola Droid, on Verizon. Got it Nov 8, 2009 - the day they were released. Recently, as in the last week it's started to become very unstable. With apps running (example Angry Birds) the app will get slower and slower, to the point it's almost start/stop then eventually I get the Android error screen that the app is no longer responding - force stop/report.

Some apps that had worked for a long time will not start at all. I've started deleting apps and moving things off the SD card back to the phone - so far no luck.

I have no idea how to troubleshoot this thing.

 

[johnlgalt]

The easiest is probably going to be clearing out the caches of different apps - the most painful is going to be a factory reset. Caches tend to take up usable memory, and as the DROID starts to run out of memory it falters.

A Factory Reset will take you back to the way the phone was when you first bought it - you'll have to log into your Google account all over again, and then install all of your apps again one by one.

Some tips for decreased memory usage:

limit the number of widgets you have
check which apps are running services in the background - these chew up availalbe memory as well

 

[takeshi]

I have no idea how to troubleshoot this thing.

It's either apps, data or hardware. The quickest but most painful way to troubleshoot is to wipe and not load apps or setup much. If the device runs smoothly then you know it's not a hardware issue. you can then load apps one by one and test after loading each app to see if you can find the problem. Same for setting up your accounts and sync, etc.

You can try removing apps one at a time to single them out but this can be an extremely tedious process.

It might help to look at CPU and memory usage when you run into these problems to see if you get any clues.

 

[dnorton]

I ended up doing the reset. Seems to be speedy again. Thanks for you help.

I did look through the application cache via settings>applications>each app, most of the apps didn't have any cached data. Clearing the cache made no difference.

 

[Sportster]

Had a similar problem a week ago. Phone was becoming nearly unuseable. So I redownloaded the ROM I'm using,MIUI,and just did a wipe everything fest. Then I slowly added the apps I use most frequently back on. I left off alot of apps I use infrequently or haven't used in a while. And I added them slowly,in small batches and watched how the unit performed. Boy did that make a difference! This thing is like new presently. I was getting constanly freezes and FC's using the camera and now it's silky smooth. I just cannot add a bunch of apps on the thing like I tried. It needs alot of open space to function well. I've got 150mb of clearance on the internal now and will have to leave it like that till I upgrade soon to the Bionic or GS2 or whatever it'll be. Till then it's bare bones....