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!
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.
There’s quite a bit of stuff that builds up that app installers don’t remove. Because Android is still pretty open, the rules around this stuff aren’t as mature as say the Windows MSI database.
When you factory reset, the entire user-data partition is wiped.
On a rooted phone I can emulate a data wipe by uninstalling apps and manually deleting a lot of stuff.
On a non-rooted phone, uninstalling then using tools like SD Maid will get you pretty far, maybe fsr enough to not notice the difference.
Such as?
“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.
Uninstall enough apps and you’ll see the crap left around.
And yes, MSI is mature compared to Android, by a country mile (as much as it sucks. I’ve done app packaging since the mid-90’s, before MSI, and what a massive difference it made). Even with it’s challenges that are largely a result of having a no-rules OS at first, just like Android, it very rarely has issues today, and then usually just for trying to do things that are work-around for apps that don’t want to follow guidelines (very few of them anymore, 99% of the time I can just run through setup and let it build the difference file). Most apps today take a matter of hours, including full testing, when they used to take days.
In theory Android has a cleaner app install/uninstall process (it’s really good, and getting better), but it still leaves stuff around sometimes. I’ve seen it plenty. I’m not sure why it happens, I just know what I see. App data folders left behind, downloaded files left behind (even with scope, because the download folder is still used).
Just because the latest versions of Android have scoped storage doesn’t mean that there isn’t crap spread around. Having reset many phones I’ve seen the difference between just uninstalling all your apps and wiping the partition.
I have folders all over the place that no uninstall will touch. My download folder is currently 8gb, and no app uninstall will clean that.
I have a half dozen folders from apps that are no longer on my phone. One has a file in it dating from over a year ago…I remember testing the app then, and uninstalling it.
Just yesterday I reinstalled an app and expected to have to create a new user account for it, but it found it’s old data folder from when I uninstalled it in August.
You still haven’t declared what this “stuff” is and, more importantly, where it leaves it.
What kind of “app data folders”? In
/data/data/? I doubt it.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).
Thank you. I fairly compulsively keep apps closed to free up memory and also don’t keep many extra apps installed.
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.