Monday, February 19, 2018

Do you know what a wake lock is?

I did not think so. Neither did I to be honest.
Until quite recently when my trusty Samsung note 4 started acting up. It suddenly started lagging or going into standby mode and not waking up. It also used to restart automatically at the most crucial moments. Leaving me helpless in the middle of a client call or whilst wanting to order a cab in a hurry.
I wiped the cache. Did a factory reset. Not once but maybe a dozen of times to no avail. After much suffering I realized that it was not necessarily something wrong with my phone; it could be something wrong with the software. And I was right. After going through some of the android forums I found that there were many Note 4 users who were experiencing the same thing as I was thanks to the the marshmallow 6 update.
Fortunately one particular post I was reading talked about a wake lock. Which turned out to be a simple piece of software which prevents the phone from going into standby mode. I must confess that the description of the google play page and the screen captures of GUI really did not give me any confidence. Mainly because it is described as a power manager (which reads as battery saver in my non tech eyes) However I took a leap of faith and installed the software. And it did the trick.
What relief! I must admit that my phone was not 100% back to normal. Maybe it was back to 80% of what it was. But that was good enough for me. It gave me the freedom to bide my time in getting a new phone instead of having to rush into it in emergency mode.
I am so grateful for that single article about the wake lock. I am sure there must be thousands of others who are experiencing the same problem I did and I sincerely hope that you come across this article and it helps you to come up with a decent solution.