When it comes to computers, whether they’re on your desktop or in your hand, nothing is more frustrating than when your favorite Android game or app crashes. Hours of progress can be lost in an instant, forcing you to replay the same tedious or difficult sections, or worse, you could lose some important work for your day job. So what can you do if you’re trying to do important things but your phone keeps crashing (besides upgrading to an awesome gaming phone)?
Why do Android apps crash?
Applications crash because something happened that the operating system didn’t know how to handle. In technical terms, this is called an unhandled exception. Applications respond to expected input to create output, but sometimes an application can search for input and find something it wasn’t programmed to do. When that happens, a game or app can crash. Most of the time, the software can’t tell you why it crashed, but there are some culprits that are responsible for most of the unhandled exceptions that interrupt your game time.
Be sure to check your memory
Programs interact with your phone’s memory all the time, either by accessing the hard drive or by preloading data into RAM. If your game or app tries to access your data storage and can’t, it probably crashes. There are many ways that programs interact with memory, so there are a few things to try to get your software working again.
restart your phone
Sometimes fixing a problem is as easy as turning it off and back on. When you use your phone, you are constantly using memory that connects and disconnects from your RAM as you browse the web or use different apps. This can cause your phone to slow down and cause problems for RAM-hungry apps and games, which can lead to crashes. Resetting your phone erases all the memory in your RAM, hopefully allowing you to game without interruption.
Check that you haven’t run out of storage space
A lot of software has a lot of data and depends on an Internet connection to serve that data. To make games run faster, it’s common to cache assets on the phone’s internal memory, so they can be accessed faster. If your software expects to have available hard drive space and turns out to have none, it will crash.
- Go to the one on your phone settings.
- Select Storage from the Settings menu.
Your phone’s storage menu might look a little different than this, but from here you can get an idea of what sorts of things you could delete to free up space.
Clear app data to make space
If you can’t sacrifice any of your apps to free up hard drive space, you can do the following and clear the app data for your game. This will remove any cached data your game has saved. Memory is not perfect and can sometimes get corrupted. Cleaning it could be the solution you need.
- Go to the one on your phone settings.
- Select Applications from the menu.
- Choose an app from which to clear cached data.
- Tap Storage and cache.
- select any Empty storage either clear cache depending on your needs.
Force stop misbehaving apps
Just because you close your app doesn’t mean it stops running. Many apps like to run in the background, and if an app has a problem while it’s actively running in the background, it can start consuming processing power and memory without you even realizing it’s happening. This will prevent not only that app from running properly, but other apps as well.
- Go to the one on your phone settings.
- Select Applications from the menu.
- Choose an app that you would like to force stop.
- Tap forced stop.
Double check your internet connection
Accidentally put your phone in airplane mode? It’s hard to find an Android game or app that doesn’t need an internet connection these days, and if your web-connected game isn’t programmed to handle a loss of connection, it might just shut down instead of letting you know. need internet. Similarly, your game might need a Wi-Fi connection, and if you’re only working with data, you might run into issues.
- Go to the one on your phone settings.
- Select network and internet from the menu.
From here, you can check the status of your Wi-Fi or data and see if you accidentally went into airplane mode.
Make sure your Android device is up to date
Gone are the days when developers released a finished product. In today’s environment, you should expect every active piece of software for your phone to have an update available or required at some point in the future.
How to update your phone
When your phone’s operating system is outdated, it can respond to your game in unexpected ways and cause it to crash. The newest games in particular are often built for the latest versions of the Android operating system, so make sure your phone is as up-to-date as possible.
- Go to the one on your phone settings.
- Select System from the menu.
- Tap Upgrade system.
Your phone will notify you if everything is up to date or if you need to update.
Update your app or game
Just like you need to keep your phone up to date, you need to make sure that your game is updated to the latest version. Android developers have access to how often their apps crash and can use the details in crash reports to make their games more stable by releasing an update.
Reinstall any offending apps or games
Sometimes the software gets corrupted and there is nothing you can do about it. Uninstalling and then reinstalling the game will ensure that you have the latest version and hopefully you’ll be able to play again.
If all else fails, factory reset your phone
If you’ve tried all of the above and nothing seems to work, it may be time to invoke the nuclear option. A factory reset will erase all data on your phone and restore it to the state it was in when you took it out of the box. All of your apps will be erased, as will everything that was on your hard drive, so this is definitely an option of last resort, but it may be the only way to get your games and apps running smoothly again.
- Go to the one on your phone settings.
- Select System from the menu.
- Tap reboot options.
- Choose Erase all data (factory reset).
You will have to confirm that you really want to proceed with the factory reset, after which there is no going back.
Applications must flow
Software isn’t perfect, so there will never be a way to guarantee that your game won’t crash, but hopefully being aware of why it happens and how to fix it when it does will prevent you from pulling your hair out in the future.
