PLEASE HELP! Old phone, new problem!

[JaySkoon93]

Hello everyone!

I looked all around this site before posting in order to avoid a duplicate post, but I could NOT find an answer or even anyone experiencing a similar problem. I have an old phone I am using as a temporary one. It is an LG Sunset L33L running on Android 5.0.1.

The issue is my notification bar up top AND my Back, Home, and Recent Apps buttons will randomly, but suddenly disappear entirely and my phone will stop responding to any touch input. For example, if I'm scrolling down through a news article, sometimes it will just suddenly stop letting me scroll (freezes up) then the notification bar and bottom buttons (and keyboard if opened) will disappear entirely and my phone will stay frozen for about 10 seconds until everything re-appears and then it will work fine. The crashes/freezes are seemingly random and I have no idea how to stop this from happening. I already did a factory reset and all of the standard troubleshooting steps. Any ideas for a fix? Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!

By the way, I'm not sure if it's related to this issue or not, but I also have a VERY laggy keyboard. Even writing this post took a long time because my keyboard can't keep up. I can type a whole sentence with my fingers before the words actually begin to appear on screen. It would be nice to fix that too!

Anyway, as I said before, any help would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you in advance!

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! It could be some 3rd party app that you habitually install that's causing the instability. The best way to narrow things down is to boot into Safe Mode, which temporarily disables all 3rd party apps. If the problem goes away in Safe Mode, then you know it's something you installed -- but then you have to uninstall apps one by one until the problem stays gone, since there's no other good way to pinpoint the culprit.

https://www.hardreset.info/devices/lg/lg-sunset-lte-l33l/faq/safe-mode/

 

[JaySkoon93]

Hello B. Diddy,

Thank you for the reply, but unfortunately, this did not resolve the issue. I even went to the length of uninstalling EVERY 3rd party app on my phone and uninstalled ALL updates of the remaining apps that I could not delete due to them being pre-installed apps that came with the phone. The issue with the keyboard lag AND the freezing/responsiveness issue was still there. HOWEVER, in Safe Mode, the phone worked like a champ! It has never been so quick! No issues whatsoever with the phone, but as soon as I turned off Safe Mode, all of the issues came rushing right back. Any other thoughts?

 

[B. Diddy]

I'm guessing the phone has some carrier bloatware from either Tracfone or Straight Talk -- if so, try Disabling them (not just uninstalling their updates) in the Settings>Apps menu.

Also, if it's not too much trouble, show us a list of all apps currently installed on the phone (after getting rid of all the 3rd party apps, as you already mentioned).