Mobile Device App Troubleshooting – CompTIA A+ 220-902 – 4.3

The apps on a mobile device can be a challenge to manage. In this video, you’ll learn how to troubleshoot the most common mobile app issues.

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Troubleshooting a dim display is obviously a problem, because you can’t see what’s on the screen of your mobile device. Even in a low-light situation, it still may be hard to pick out exactly what’s being shown on the screen. If you can, at least, see part of the screen, it may be worthwhile to try adjusting the brightness settings. Under iOS, you can find this under Settings, Display and brightness. Under Android, it’s under Settings, Display, and Brightness level. And in Windows Phone, it’s under Settings and Brightness.

If the problem still exists and you’re not able to get this bright enough, it could be a backlight problem. And in that case, you’ll have to replace the entire display part of the mobile device.

Our mobile devices don’t connect to a physical wired network, so we rely on our wireless connectivity to connect all of our devices together. If we’re having intermittent connectivity, we may want to try moving closer to our wireless access point, or to even try a different access point to see if we can get a stronger signal.

If there’s no wireless access at all, we want to be sure that WiFi is enabled in the mobile device. You might also want to check and make sure that the security key that’s configured in the access point matches the security key that’s configured on the wireless device. Sometimes, a hard reset can also restart the wireless configuration and get that 802.11 wireless network running again.

If our wireless problems revolve around a Bluetooth connection, then we want to make sure we have Bluetooth enabled. You might also want to unpair and then repair the Bluetooth component, again. And sometimes, performing a hard reset on the mobile device will reset the Bluetooth subsystem and get everything communicating again.

We cannot only view pictures and video on our mobile devices, but we can also broadcast this information to a television or a monitor. It’s very common to see this in conjunction with an Apple TV, a Smart Television, a Chromecast, and other components that will interact with your mobile device. Unfortunately, each one of these mobile devices works differently, depending on the type of mobile device that you have. So make sure you check the requirements for your device and the applications that can run on it, and see which of these components it can interact with.

In most of these configurations, both the component that’s connected to your television and the device that you’re using have to be on the same wireless network. We can’t mix a private and a guest network, for instance. Everything has to be on the same local subnet. Also, keep in mind that sending a video from your mobile device to your television is going to use quite a bit of bandwidth. So you want to make sure that you have the strongest signal strength possible on your wireless network.

If the touch screen of your mobile device is completely black and it’s not responding at all to input, then you’re going to have a problem trying to interact with the operating system. Even with this black screen, you can sometimes get the power option to appear by holding down the Power button on an Apple iOS device, and then you can slide to Power Off. You can also, alternatively, hold down the Power button and the Home button on the iOS device, simultaneously. Hold those for 10 seconds, and the device will hard reset.

On many Android devices, there’s a removable battery. So you can remove the battery and put it back in to perform a hard reset. On other devices, you can hold down the power and the volume button, simultaneously, until the device restarts. But not all devices use this combination. Some devices, you have to remove the battery to perform a hard reset.

Sometimes our applications, themselves, will have a problem. The application may not load, or once it does load, it has very poor performance. In those cases, we may want to restart the phone. Hold down the Power button, power it off, and then power it back on again.

If the application is running and having poor performance, then you may need to administratively stop the application. On an iPhone, you can double tap the Home button and slide the application up and out of memory. On Android, you can go to Settings and Apps, select the application, and choose Force stop. If the application continues to have a problem, you may want to see if a newer version of the application is available and install that onto your mobile device.

We rely on our mobile devices to securely transfer email from one place to the other. And many times, this email communication is encrypted. Very often, this encryption is integrated with our mail system. A common one is Microsoft Outlook, that automatically can encrypt all of the communications going through your email. In this case, every single user on these mobile devices is going to have a private key. And of course, you can’t decrypt this information unless that key is installed onto the mobile device. So it’s important to have a method to install all of these keys. It’s very common, if you’re running a mobile device manager, to manage all of those key distributions from one central point, and then install them, remotely, onto all of your mobile devices.

If you’re finding that the battery of your mobile device seems to be depleting faster than normal, you may be in an outside area of your mobile provider, and it’s constantly trying to find a signal. If you’re in one of these remote areas, you may want to turn on airplane mode, so that your phone isn’t constantly searching for a signal and using your battery.

You might also want to consider disabling any unnecessary features. If you’re not using the GPS or the 802.11 network, you can always disable those features and save that much more power. Your mobile device will also monitor the applications and can tell you what application is using the most battery. In iOS, you can find this under Settings, General, and Usage. Under an Android operating system, you can check Settings and Battery.

And of course, these batteries don’t last forever. If this is an older device, you may find that the battery is losing its charge ability, over time. And eventually, you may have to swap out that battery for a new one.

Our mobile devices are constantly monitoring the internal temperature of the device. And if the temperature does get too high, the device will automatically turn itself off in an attempt to avoid any type of overheating or heat damage. If you are charging or discharging the battery, if you’re using a lot of CPU on that mobile device, or you’re using the display light constantly, all of these create heat and can increase the amount of heat inside of the device.

One way to check what applications are using the most CPU is to view the application usage on the mobile device. And of course, you should always avoid having the device in direct sunlight. This will heat the device very quickly, and cause it to shut down automatically.

If the problem with your mobile device is that nothing is responding at all– you’re not able to get the screen or any buttons to respond to you– then you may want to perform a soft reset. This will power it down and turn off. But of course, if it’s completely frozen, even that might not work. You might want to perform a hard reset.

In iOS, you hold down the Power and the Home button for 10 seconds. And on Android, there are a number of different combinations of the Power button, the Home button, and the Volume button, depending on the type of Android device. If you continue to have problems with the system freezing, and you think the problem might be related to software, you could perform a factory reset of the device and reload all of your applications and data, to see if that doesn’t clear up where the problem might be occurring.

If we’re using an application on our mobile device and we’re not getting any sound from that particular app, we first want to check the volume settings for the mobile device. There are often both application volume settings and volume settings for the phone itself. If the problem is with the software itself, then we may want to stop the application and restart. Or you may want to uninstall the application and re-install, and see if that fixes the problem.

Of course, the issue may be with the speakers that are on your mobile device, itself. So you could also try plugging in some headphones and see if you’re getting audio through your headphones, instead of the speaker that’s on the mobile device.

One very common problem on these mobile devices is that one application will begin playing a sound, and then it will suddenly stop because another application is taking control of the speakers. One way to prevent these dueling applications is to keep your primary application in the foreground. That way, another application can’t cause that sound to stop.

And if we’re not getting any sound from the speaker out of any application on your phone, then you may want to try reloading the operating system of your phone, or performing a factory reset to see if the problem may be related to software.

If you’re using the touch screen of your mobile device and it’s unresponsive, or what you’re touching is not responding properly, then you might want to try closing some applications and freeing up some memory. Sometimes that can resolve some resource contention. You might want to perform either a soft or a hard reset of the device. But this may be related to the hardware of the mobile device itself, which means you have to replace the digitizer or reseat some of the cables on the inside of the device.

You may find that the operating system of your mobile device locks you out of the device. On an iOS device, the default is to erase everything on the phone after 10 failed login attempts. You can disable this, but it’s going to increase the delays between each attempt, in order to avoid somebody brute-forcing your particular login.

On an Android device, it will lock or wipe the phone after failed attempts, as well– although, you can use your Google login to unlock the phone. On Windows Phone, it will also lock after a number of failed attempts. And you may have to perform a hard reset or even a factory reset to be able to gain access to that phone again.