Why is my notification bar continually moving up and down?

[AC Question]

Lately, my notification bar on my Galaxy S4 will continually "refresh" -- it will float up (like it does when there's a new notification), but no new notification will appear, and then the bar will slide back down, the same as it was before. Sometimes it does this every few seconds; I'll be reading something online and watch my notification bar slide in and out of view.

I tried disabling every app that has notifications sitting on the notification bar--Clean Master, BlueLight filter, my weather app--but nothing did the trick. I don't have any feature enabled that causes my notification bar to disappear when not in use, either.

Please help! This is very annoying and I can't find a solution to the problem.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! I recall someone else asking about this several weeks ago, but can't remember if there was a definite solution. Try wiping the cache partition: http://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-5744

 

[RicktheSicilian]

Question-asker here!

Thank you for the suggestion. I tried wiping the cache and that did not work. Is there anything else I can try?

 

[B. Diddy]

Ok, try Safe Mode, to see if it's a 3rd party app that's causing the problem. https://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-11724

 

[RicktheSicilian]

I'm in safe mode now and the notification bar is behaving normally. How do I go about locating the third-party app responsible for the bug?

 

[B. Diddy]

Unfortunately, there's no easy way to pinpoint it. You'd have to uninstall apps one by one until the behavior goes away. Have you scoured the internet to see if anyone else has had this issue? As I mentioned before, I recall someone else having this issue on this forum, but I couldn't find that thread easily.

 

[RicktheSicilian]

I ended up just deleting one by one. I had an idea of which app might have been the culprit based on recent updates. It seems to be both my Amber Weather app and, primarily, my Clean Master app, oddly enough. And even when I redownloaded them, the bug happened again, so it wasn't just a one-time thing.

So far, my phone is functioning as normal! Thank you for your help!

 

[B. Diddy]

Excellent! I'm not too surprised about Clean Master, though. It's a problematic app for many, and the company's practices can also be somewhat questionable, when it comes to things like adware and other issues.