By now many Samsung Galaxy S5 devices are seeing the newest Android OS update rolling out. The Galaxy S5 Android 5.0 Lollipop update was pushed out first by Verizon and soon afterwards other carriers began to catch up to Big Red. Most of the time these updates work just fine, but in some cases the update can cause some problems for users. There are a few things that you can do to help avoid the dreadful factory rest and long phone calls with customer service representatives.
The other night I received a text from my brother that he was experiencing some problems after taking the Lollipop update. Some of the issues were things like lag and his contacts app kept getting errors. Being the wise older brother he is, he contacted me who can guide him through some troubleshooting steps to get the problem fixed.
Tips Before Taking an OTA:
- Always make a backup of your important items such as photos if not saved on an SD card, contacts, and important documents. Quick tip on backing things up is use cloud based apps/features to save your stuff. Use Google to sync you contacts rather than using internal storage or even carrier apps.
- If you have a rooted phone you will more than likely have to unroot.
- If you do unroot be informed that getting root back might take a while to get back or maybe not at all. Make sure you don’t need root before proceeding.
- If you are rooted and have a custom recovery installed make a nandroid backup because it will save everything on the phone.
- Make sure you have a charged up device. At least 75% of the battery charged up.
- Budget yourself some time. This update took me about 30min altogether between downloading and installing the update.
- Some people recommend doing a factory reset before accepting an OTA. But be warned that you will lose all data/info/files on your phone’s internal storage.
So you have the update all installed and began experiencing some issues. Now what?
Tips After Taking the OTA:
- Reboot the device, wait a minute or two, and then use the device as normal. If that doesn’t help try the following steps.
- Go to Settings > Applications > Select the app giving you trouble > Clear Cashe > Clear Data. Mind you this will wipe only that apps information. For example, if clearing the Google Play Store you will be asked to sign in again when you go to the app again.
- Clear the system cashe. This is a little trickier. Follow these steps with caution.
- Power down the device
- Hold volume up + home + power at the same time
- In the recovery screen use the volume buttons to scroll to wipe cashe
- Use the power button to select/ok
- The phone will wipe the cashe
- Scroll back up to reboot system and use the power button to select it and reboot the phone
- Profit!
- If that doesn’t work, unfortunately a factory restore/reset is the last resort.
Hopefully these tips can help you solve the issues you are experiencing with your device. These steps are universal (with exception of recovery screen procedures). My brother reported back to me saying after performing clearing the system cashe there was not any lag or issues with the contacts app. Back when I took the OTA with my Verizon GS5 (same phone as my brother) I simply took the update and installed it without clearing anything out and had no issues. With that said some users are having issues and others are not (obviously).
Have you had any issues after taking an OTA? Let us know in the comments! Share this post if you think it could help someone you may know.
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