Before we dive in, let’s bring out one thing up front, which is, that you will hardly have to deal with mobile hardware. Rather, you will be dealing with software aspects of the mobile device. There are tools that you can use to address these issues and will fix the problem until the problem occurs again, or will help you out sorting those problems.
Not that, in case the in-house troubleshooting did not work for the device, you need to take it to the authorized service centre. Also, keep in mind to check on any manufacturer or OS resource out there for the right steps. Let’s dive in now.
Check and Tweak Configuration/ Settings
Modern mobile devices come with operating systems that offer you tons of configurable settings as well as the apps the user installs on the device. A lot of time you may find the issue could be regarding a few configuration changes. If the issue seems like something not related to configuration, save time and come back again after a reboot. You do not need to spend the whole day looking at the settings if a simple reboot fixes the problem. If you find a setting that does not seem quite appealing to you, before you change anything, keep track of the settings, log it somewhere and compare them.
Close Running Apps
Mobile operating systems come in with a way to close your running apps and the most common and convenient one is to swipe the app in a particular direction from the list of open apps. If you generally come in with the desktop background and how the desktop works, you may misunderstand when and why would we close a mobile app. Let’s take a look under the hood at how they work.
On these traditional widely used consumer computers, you open an application when you need it, and will run until the task is done, crashes or you decide to close it. Since mobile devices have much-limited computing resources and battery power, you do not want any applications grabbing a large chunk of the resources and burning the power like crazy when they are not even in use, not even the device is being used. To tackle these issues directly, the modern mobile OS comes in with some management system for running apps to optimize performance and battery life.
For the most part, the OS will take care of them if they need to but there are times, when you may need to manually take a look at the issue, especially when you have an app frozen, malfunctioning, misbehaving or you suspect they are causing some issue with the mobile device.
Note that, some apps behave in a way that, if you close the app, they may still leave the background process running even though you closed the GUI. In Android, a manager called Application Manager will let you force-stop an app, and help you kill the background process running. In iOS, a regular swipe will take care of the issue. Although Windows phone is not widely seen, people using them may still come across them. In that case, you need to address these issues via application or battery settings.