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
      2·
      11 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·
          11 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).