The way to troubleshoot 3rd party applications is by booting up into Safe Mode and today I’m going to show you how to do this for the Galaxy Note 4.
One of the reasons why I enjoy Android so much is because of how much power our 3rd party applications can have with our smartphones and tablets. As they say, with great power comes great responsibility and this means that you must keep track of what your apps are doing to your device.
If you have noticed that your Galaxy Note 4 has started to slow down, produce random errors or force closes, poor battery life or even seeing icons in the status bar that you have no idea what they are from, then you might have an issue with one of your 3rd party applications.
Today I’m going to show you how to boot your Galaxy Note 4 into Safe mode so that you can figure out if the culprit is one of your 3rd party applications.
Booting your Android device up into Safe Mode will disable any and all 3rd party apps that you have installed from the Google Play Store(and elsewhere). Unless an application is packaged inside the core Android platform, then you will not be able to launch it while you are in Safe Mode. This is why you don’t always want to boot up into Safe Mode, but this feature will help you find out if whatever issue you are having is caused by one of your applications.
Galaxy Note 4 Safe Mode
- Power Down Your Galaxy Note 4
- Press and Hold the Power Button
- When You See the Samsung Logo, Let Go of the Power Button
- When You Let Go of the Power Button, Immediately Press and Hold the Volume Down Button
- Continue Holding the Volume Down Button Until Your Galaxy Note 4 is Fully Booted
- Let Go of the Volume Down Button and then Unlock Your Galaxy Note 4
Explanation
The first thing we need to do before we can get into Safe Mode is to completely power down your Galaxy Note 4. If you need to, take the back plate off and pull the battery. Once the device is powered off, you want to press and hold the Power button until you see the Samsung splash screen. Once you see the Samsung logo, you need to let go of the Power button and immediately press and hold the Volume Down button. Continue holding down the Volume Down button until Android has booted up and you see the Lock Screen.
Once you see the Lock Screen, you can let go of the Volume Down button and then proceed to unlock your Galaxy Note 4. If you did this process correctly, you will notice a ‘Safe Mode’ watermark at the bottom of your device(typically at the bottom left). If you do not see the watermark then power down your Galaxy Note 4 again and go through the entire process over. It can take a couple of times before you get the hang of it but once you figure it out, it should be rather easy.
Now that you have your Galaxy Note 4 booted into Safe Mode, you can try to reproduce any issues that you might have been experiencing before. If the issue had to do with battery life, then try to use your device as you normally would(minus 3rd party apps) and see if you notice the same amount of battery drain as before. If you used to get force closes, then try to browse through the Android system and see if you can reproduce the force close messages. If you notice that things are running perfectly in Safe Mode, then it is most likely a 3rd party application that is causing the issue.
You will have to uninstall 3rd party applications, one by one, in order to find out exactly what is causing the issue. This can be a time-consuming effort and it might be best to uninstall them all, or do a factory reset to start from scratch. Either way, at least we figured out that it was a 3rd party application that was causing it and not the Android install(or Galaxy Note 4) itself. If the issue wasn’t solved with this troubleshooting step, then you could try to wipe the cache partition of the Galaxy Note 4 to see if that will.
As always, if you have any questions about this tutorial then please do not hesitate to ask in the comments section below. I don’t know everything about Android but I am always willing to help out in any way that I can.
