Droid RAZR MAXX Background and Notification Bar Disappearing Issue

[acman319]

I have been noticing a very frustrating issue in the past couple of days with my Droid RAZR MAXX (4.1.2, not rooted) and was wondering if the community might be able to shed some light on the issue for me or know of some possible solutions.

So basically, whenever I have a notification in the notification bar (be it from the SMS app, WhatsApp, etc.) and I go to slide it down, the bar at the top disappears and then the background (the apps and widgets remain in place) goes to black for a few seconds then returns to the normal background repeatedly for several minutes. This keeps happening until finally the notification bar returns and the background returns to normal. While all of this happens, I cannot open any app. Upon selecting an app, it simply crashes right away. Doesn't matter which app it is. They all crash.

I should note that the exact same thing happens when I long-press the home button to bring up the running apps.

There have only been a few occasions where everything worked properly in the past few days. That is, I long-pressed the home button or dragged down the notification bar without any issues. However, the majority of the time this problem occurs and it has, needless to say, become very frustrating. I am not eligibile for a new phone upgrade until March 2014 so I am kind of stuck with this phone for now. Any ideas or suggestions as to what this could be?

Thanks in advance!

 

[B. Diddy]

I've never heard of that problem, so I can only suggest some generic things to try.

1. You could try clearing the cache or the data for the Homescreen system app. First try clearing the cache by going to Settings/Apps/All, selecting Homescreen, and tapping Clear Cache. If that doesn't work, you could try tapping Clear Data instead, but this means you'll have to set up your homescreens again.

2. Try clearing the system cache partition by following these steps: Wipe Cache Partition - DROID RAZR / RAZR MAXX by MOTOROLA
This clears out the cobwebs from the system cache, and might make things run more smoothly.

3. It could be from some installed app that isn't playing nice with the stock Android notification system. So check your list of apps and consider temporarily uninstalling apps that give notifications frequently (like the ones you mention--SMS app and WhatsApp), and see if the problem persists.

 

[acman319]

Thanks. I will give these a try. Will clearing the system cache partition erase all of my data? Just want to make sure before going through with it. I just saw that it will not. I will try these out and let you know what happens. Thanks again!

Update:
So decided to give option #3 a try before having to resort to a hard reset, and it seems to have done the trick. I went into safe mode and uninstalled some recent apps which I had installed about a day or two prior to the issue arising. The culprit apps seem to be NPR and/or Waze. After uninstalling both apps, the phone seems to be working fine once again and my other apps are not crashing, my notification bar doesn't disappear and neither does my wallpaper.

Thanks again for the tips!

 

[nancy30]

Did you do a Factory Data Reset

 

[acman319]

No. I tried clearing the cache partition but that did nor work. So I went into safe mode and uninstalled some recent apps. It must have been one of those as it now works.

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