Note 4 slows, freezes, and restarts outside of safe mode

[AC Question]

My Note 4 has slowed down a bit over the last few years. Recently though it has started to completely freeze up and sometimes it restarts randomly. On occasion I will have to remove the battery to get it to power on again. I decided to do a factory reset and enjoyed about 5-10 minutes of good performance once all my apps were installed again. So long story short, same issue. Severely slow performance/freezing, restarting. When I boot the device into safe mode it seems to work well, but I haven't tested it long enough to really know, so far so good. I have disabled S-voice, turned off window/transition/animator scales, performed a second factory reset, deleted many recently downloaded apps, wiped cache through recovery menu. I am going back through and deleting apps one by one and clearing cache to try and figure out if one of them is the culprit, since safe mode at least lets me have a stable device. What else can I do? Is this a hardware issue?

 

[nahoku]

If the phone works in Safe mode, I doubt it's a hardware issue. More than likely there is an app causing the issue, and it might not even be a recently installed one... it could be an app you installed long ago that got a recent update, or even a pre-installed app like one of Google's that got updated. There have been quite a few reports of Facebook and Google apps causing issues of late.

You're doing exactly what you should be doing to isolate the problem app. Just don't forget about the long installed apps and updates they may have gotten.

Please let us know what your find. It may be helpful to others.

Forgot to mention that it could also be a corrupted contact, photo, etc attempting sync. If you have sync turned on, you might try turning it off to see what happens.

 

[B. Diddy]

Also, if you have an SD card inserted, try Unmounting it in Settings>Storage.