Phone rapidly cycling through apps on its own...it wont stop.

greydarrah

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May 5, 2010
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Got to the end of a run today and my RunKeeper app was locked up. I finally got it to close, but then the phone started rapidly and constantly cycling through apps and screens, even moving apps and widget around. It's like an invisible person is constantly touching and dragging their fingers across the screen. Holding down the power button for 5 seconds got it shut down, but when restarted, it resumed it's app cycling. I could have gotten some sweat (from my run) on the volume buttons or down in the headset jack, so I stuck it in a bag of rice to cover that possibility. A factory reset is an option I can explore later tonight if no other suggestions are made.

Anyone ever see/hear of anything like this?
 

greydarrah

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Try booting into Recovery Mode and wiping the cache partition. Bear in mind that this can take up to ten minutes on the Nexus 5. http://forums.androidcentral.com/nexus-5-rooting-roms-hacks/352008-guide-nexus-5-recovery.html

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Please excuse any typos or autocorrect derps.

I cleared the cache, rebooted, and it was initially still screwy. But after about 30 minutes, it seemed to settle down and return to normal. Very strange...never seen anything like it. Watching the phone, it seemed like a ghost was going through screen, after screen, after screen...rapidly. I would actually suspect a virus, but if that was the case, I think we would be hearing more complaints like mine on the forums. Maybe I had a little water (sweat) in there and having the phone running for 20 or 30 minutes generated enough heat to evaporate it???
 

B. Diddy

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Weird. This kind of thing happened before on my old old (old) Droid Incredible, and usually cleared up if I really cleaned the screen (or the weird optical mouse sensor it had). Is your screen completely clean?