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Help Homescreen is not responding

A

arnol215

Lurker
I've had a Motorola Razr Maxx for a few months now and it seemed to be working fine initially, but then it started periodically crashing. Sometimes I would be running an app and it would start being very slow and then would say the app was not responding. More often, it would be in sleep mode, I would press the button to turn on the screen and the unlock screen would be missing my background image. When this happened and I tried to unlock the phone, it would freeze and a message would pop up saying Homescreen is not responding or has stopped or something like that. In either of these situations, the only way to get the phone back to normal was to hold the power button and reboot it. This tended to happen a few times a day and caused me to miss phone calls and texts when it was not responding in sleep mode.

I eventually performed a reset to factory settings, reinstalled all of my apps and got it back to the way it was. It worked completely fine for about two weeks. But yesterday, it started again and crashed four times throughout the day. Before the first crash, I noticed in my task manager that it had only about 70 MB of free RAM, but on the subsequent crashes there was plenty of free RAM. Also, immediately after one of the reboots was finished when turning the screen off the effect where the image on the screen shrinks down like in old CRT TV's was very slow. I don't know if this is a symptom or if it always does that for a while after rebooting (It did stop after a few minutes).

I've found through searching that other people have had this problem, but not a solution for it. What should I do?
 
Agreeing with the previous two responses.

You did a Factory Data Reset and then added apps. If you ran it in Safe Mode (uninstalling nothing) and the problem stopped it would tell you that one of the apps you added is causing the problem.

... Thom
 
I've got my phone running in safe mode, and it has gone a couple days without crashing. It will be a while before I'm confident that that has resolved the crashing issue. But, supposing it is an app causing the issue, what is the best way to isolate the problem app?
 
Great ... Safe Mode is pointing the way.

How many apps are we talking about? Example ... I have 170 installed.

Are any of them Task Killers?

Going by when ot started happening might or might not give you a lead. The reason is that it might be an incompatibility in one app that runs great under Ice Cream Sandwich but doesn't under Jelly Bean.

... Thom
 
I have approximately 52 apps about half of which came with the phone and would not be affected by safe mode. As far as task manager apps, I have Advanced Task Manager - Killer by INFOLIFE LLC.
 
So you have added about 25. You could start with a Factory Data Reset and slowly add them. Like two a day. When the problem finally hits you should know the cause.

If it was me I would first remove the Task Killer and see if it is the one.

... Thom
 
When I did the factory reset, I immediately reinstalled all my apps and it worked fine for two weeks. So I think it would take a very long time to know which app was causing the problem. Are task-manager apps known to cause such problems, or are there others with a history of issues? Would it work to wait for the phone to crash and systematically remove apps until the crashes stop?
 
Here's the deal. Play Store right now has just under 1 million apps. They were written by at least 1 million people. There are no generalities that hold.

The way it works is that you start with what the manufacturer provided and slowly add new apps. You take responsibility for each app you add when you grant it permissions.

You only have 25 apps. It isn't going to take that many days. You are going to learn stuff while you do it.

Task Killers by their very nature are know to cause havoc and they are the first thing I suspect. That is suspect and not know.

... Thom
 
arnol215 said:
I've got my phone running in safe mode, and it has gone a couple days without crashing. It will be a while before I'm confident that that has resolved the crashing issue. But, supposing it is an app causing the issue, what is the best way to isolate the problem app?
Click to expand...

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Hello, Can I ask you something? How do I put my phone on safe mode?
 
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