JJ's Phone Phroblems

[Moonshroom]

I'll be the first to admit that my phone is kinda (totally) crap: 2017, Android 4,2... but this is getting ridiculous.

I rooted the damn thing in order to be able to close all processes merrily and free up memory and that *USED* to do the trick, but no more. Now I can't even post a picture on Twitter, that's how bad it has gotten.

Do you guys know of any "techno-necromancy" I can use to breathe a second life in it? I really cannot afford to replace it.

Thanks in advance.

[SpookyZalost]

well you have a few options...

I know exactly how you feel because I extended the life my last phone until it met it's unfortunate end at a crowd of students stampeding when I was going to ITT (they closed 4 months in )

but I was always struggling to do things because the android OS on my asus zen phone kept either slowing down heavily or apps kept eating memory like pacman eating pellets.

I went with an open source android derivative at the time  but I couldn't get Ingress working on it very well (I was big into it at the time, now I'm a geocacher ) so i was saving for an update while working as a cook at pizza hut.

but at the time it was more than enough for my uses given I was stuck with a 4GB of memory phone and a 16gb micro SD card resources were at a premium.

these days it's a lot easier to just go with something like Lineage OS https://wiki.lineageos.org/

it's an android variant that's designed specifically for older android phones.

just remember some important tips.

First, you need to set your youtube, twitter, etc settings to a lower quality setting.

youtube pushes a lot of 1080p and higher video at max settings so for phone bandwidth and memory reasons I leave mine around 360p unless I actually want to watch something on it's tiny screen, even with my moto X4 which way surpasses my old zenphone 2.

as for twitter, a lot of people post higher resolution images so the file size when stored in cache take up a lot of room.

second, you might want to consider tethering and a small notebook if you don't mind a portability hit.

this is because despite the low memory phones still make decent modems and tethering lets you connect form anywhere over mobile data.

most importantly though, see if twitter let's you clear cache upon exit.  a lot of apps, twitter included store data in memory and don't clear it upon exit.

I think there must be an app that does this too? but I forget, it's been a while, might be a setting under developer options as well.

hopefully you find this helpful.

 - Zalost, Resident technomancer

[Moonshroom]

Thanks, man! I'll look into all of that