How to Fix a Frozen Mobile Phone Screen

It can be very frustrating when your mobile phone freezes. There are many reasons why this can happen. It may be due to memory overload, a hardware issue, an incompatible app, or a software problem. The first step when troubleshooting is to plug it into the charger to make sure the battery hasn’t run out. The second step is to restart it which may just resolve any temporary issues.

Force your phone to restart

If you want to know what to do what to do if your phone is frozen, you may have to force it to restart. On modern Android phones, pressing and holding down the power button for about 30 seconds can force it to restart. If the phone has a removable battery, you can remove it and reinsert it to force a restart. 

To force restart a later model than iPhone 8:

• Quickly press and release the volume-up button.
• Quickly press and release the volume-down button.
• Press and hold the right side button until the Apple logo appears.

While you may expect a frozen iPhone at times, you may think having a frozen MacBook Pro is an unusual situation. It is more common than you may think. A common question Mac users ask is “Why does my Mac freeze?” There could be various reasons for this such as not having enough free hard drive space or having too many tabs open on your browser. To restart an unresponsive Mac all you may need to do is to free up some hard drive space. One common reason why a Macbook keeps freezing is an app crashing. If you want to know how to unfreeze Macbook you may have to force quit an unresponsive app. Force quitting an unresponsive app may also be necessary on a frozen mobile phone. 

Force quit an unresponsive app

To know how to unfreeze a phone, force quitting an app that’s causing a problem could provide the solution. 

• You will need to display all the open apps to find the one that’s causing an issue. You can do this on newer phones by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. Another way is to tap the little square icon at the bottom of the screen. 
• Swipe through the apps to see which one is frozen and swipe it off the screen. 
• If you can’t close the app this way, open Settings and select Apps. Tap the app you want to close, and choose Force Stop. 

On an iPhone, you can do the following to force quit an unresponsive app: 

• If you have a newer iPhone, swipe up from the bottom of the screen. Pause in the middle and swipe to the left or to the right to find the frozen app. Swipe up on the preview to force it to close. 
• If you have an iPhone 8 or earlier model you will double tap the home button and the bottom of the screen. Swipe left or right to find the frozen up and swipe up on it to close it. 

If an app keeps causing problems on either an Android phone or iPhone, you may have to delete it to prevent future problems. You need to be cautious when installing apps and make sure you use trusted sources. 

Perform a factory reset

A factory reset may be necessary when phone frozen won’t turn off. You need to take into account that this will erase all the data on your phone. If you have backups this won’t be a problem as you can restore the data. 

To perform a factory reset on your Android phone

• Press and hold the power button until it powers down.
• Press and hold the recovery mode buttons.
• Use the volume buttons to scroll to Wipe data/factory reset and press the power button. 
• Select Yes to confirm.

Restore your iPhone in recovery mode

You can restore your iPhone in recovery mode. Connect it to your computer with a USB cable and open Finder. Select your iPhone in the left panel and put it in recovery mode. On iPhone 8 and later you quickly press and release the volume-up button. Then quickly press and release the volume-down button. Press and hold the side button until you see the recovery mode screen. Click Restore on your Mac.

If you’ve backed up your iPhone to iCloud, you can easily put your personal files and settings back on your phone. 

Conclusion

“Why is my phone frozen” is a question that has many answers. Since we are highly dependent on our smartphones, a non-working phone becomes a big headache. But as mentioned here, there are ways to overcome these issues. To troubleshoot you will need to figure out the problem so you can use the right solution to fix it. Whether it’s restarting your phone or force quitting an unresponsive app, you can resolve the issue and get your phone functioning perfectly again.