Phone randomly restarting, malware or replace?

The Sandbox Software/Technology
1

Starting about a week ago my phone has started freezing and needing a restart once or twice a day.

It’s around 4 years old, android.

Is it more likely malware, or old phone causing it?

Perhaps unrelated but my credit card had a recent fraud attempt.

2

You could try freeing up storage on the phone by deleting apps and files. At 4 years though I think that you are due for a new phone.

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3

Hm, it has about ~50% space free when I look. I think the battery has about a year left before it’s too short to be trusty.

Cautious of buying new and just porting malware over…

4

You could try a factory reset and see if that clears up the problem.

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5

Is the version still supported for updates?

I know you say that it’s 4 years old; but not sure if your indicating how long you’ve owned it vs. how old the particular model version is.

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6

I bought it newish when it came out.

I was leaving a few chrome tabs open more or less indefinitely, that and deleting all browsing data seemed to fix it for now.

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FWIW, I also finding just rebooting the phone periodically can go a long way to keeping your memory cache “clean”.

Sounds like you ran into a situation where some browser code was leaving some orphaned processes in memory. system reads memory as being used by something and something isn’t running; but the phone cannot recover that memory for other things

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8

It’s still freezing on my home wifi and constantly cuts in and out. My wife doesn’t have the same problem. So I think it’s time for a new phone. The NFC reader doesn’t work, I don’t think it ever has but now I want it for some things. And the battery just lasts a day if I use it much. So all in all, time for a new phone…

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9

Any suggestions for a replacement that’s around as capable as a pixel 4a? I don’t want to buy used / refurbished, but I don’t really care about bells and whistles

10

Pixel 8a?

If you were content with a 4a, the 8a should be fine, although prices have gone up, and the modem in the 8a can be a little finicky in certain situations, like on the fringes of better-grade 5G service (“5G+” and “5GE” in AT&T icon-speak).

I could ramble on about my observations having just upgraded to a Pixel 9 Pro, but that’s probably more bells-whistles than you’re looking for.

I will say that for my next phone, I’ll probably go into a physical store so I can get a feel for the phones, and check out the various vendors’ implementations of Android. The flagship Pixels are starting to be priced like the flagship Samsungs and iPhones, and while I do like bells and whistles and stock Android that receives timely updates… I was tempted to wait for the 9a.

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11

I got super lazy, went to a Samsung store, told them I wanted something simple and that I didn’t care about bells and whistles, got a Samsung a25, let’s see how it does.

For various reasons it’s actually a bit of a nuisance for me to get a pixel right now.

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12

The keyboard on this samsung is absolute garbage.

Doesn’t autocorrect the most obvious things, insists in incorrectly overwriting other things multiple times. It’s just so bad compared to my pixel its hard to believe.

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A month later, samsung autocorrect is still absolute garbage

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I only have iPhone vs Samsung to compare, but i often want to smash the iPhone any time i use it.

Hmm, there are some obvious opportunities for improvement in the above…i also got a new phone recently, so maybe it needs to learn to capitalize the i or i just never noticed before.

15

It cant get a single contraction right. Its, annoying since my last phone apways got those.

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My phone, it’s working fine for that.

17

Have you tried resetting the keyboard settings? I wonder if you taught it some naughty behavior.

18

I hate this samsung.

So it wont ever let me paste from my clipboard into goactuary (in a browser). Sometimes, the content will show in suggested text, but a hard press only lets me save to samsung pass, which i literally never want to do.

And less annoying but still annoying, autocorrect continues to be absolute fucking garbage. How are these phones popular? I want to just throw it out the window.

19

I get a paste / select all / clipboard / extract text option if I press in a text window for half second or so. I also have a separate button with preview of the clipboard when the typing window is up.

I have Samsung Keyboard v 5.9.00.60 on a new S24FE. I think it has done the overwrite multiple times thing to me, but it could have also been my work iPhone doing that. Been great otherwise.