Greeting all, I’ve only ever been an android user, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone talk about this. My Galaxy S21 is starting to have performance issues and I’m curious if a clean install would breath new life into it?

Does this help with android devices like a fresh install on a PC, or do android devices just get bogged down with updates? Would it be worth the trouble to back things up and do a factory reset?

Thanks!

  • Atemu@lemmy.mlEnglish
    91·
    10 months ago

    Not really. If you uninstalled all apps, you’d effectively end up in the same state as a clean install (modulo system settings). Reversely, if you did a clean wipe and then installed all of your apps again, you’d end up in roughly the same state as before.

    In 9/10 cases, it’s not the OS that’s bogging down your device but the apps. Take a look at memory usage and uninstall or stop things you don’t need running in the background.

    • Infinite_IndecisionOPEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Thank you. I fairly compulsively keep apps closed to free up memory and also don’t keep many extra apps installed.

      • Atemu@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        Note that Android usually does a pretty good job of that by itself. Make sure you’re not using (zram) swap or anything that would confuse Android’s memory management.
        If your RAM isn’t >50% full, memory used by apps likely isn’t the issue. Keep an eye on that.

      • Atemu@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        There’s quite a bit of stuff that builds up that app installers don’t remove.

        Such as?

        Because Android is still pretty open, the rules around this stuff aren’t as mature as say the Windows MSI database.

        “Mature” and anything relating to the insanity that is Windows package management do not belong in the same sentence.

        By default, Android has pretty strict guidelines where apps are even allowed to store state to begin with and will wipe all of those places upon uninstall. Integration state (default apps, app-related system settings etc.) is quite minimal and I’ve never had any remaining after an app has been uninstalled.
        The only possible leftover state after uninstall I can think of is things apps can store in the user storage (“sdcard”) when given explicit permission to do so.

        Besides, app data storage of any sort is unlikely to “bog down” your phone anyways unless usage is abnormally excessive, making you run into IO or free space issues.

          • Atemu@lemmy.mlEnglish
            21·
            10 months ago

            it still leaves stuff around sometimes. I’ve seen it plenty.

            You still haven’t declared what this “stuff” is and, more importantly, where it leaves it.

            App data folders left behind

            What kind of “app data folders”? In /data/data/? I doubt it.

            downloaded files left behind

            Duh. If the user downloaded files through the app and explicitly told the app to put those in downloads, those should remain. It’s user data at that point, not app data.

            Downloads are also just inane user files. They won’t slow anything down (again, excluding excessive storage use; causing free space issues).