When I use my phone, it sometimes gets quite hot. Usually, when I spend too much time on YouTube or using a data-heavy way of communicating like video chat.
Cell phones get hot when the battery supplies a large amount of power and is draining relatively quickly—usually caused by having applications running in the background or by power-hungry activities. Additionally, as your phone ages, its sensitivity to power-hungry activities goes up.
If your phone is getting hot or seems to have developed a hotter than average operating temperature, read on. In the rest of this article, I will talk about the different reasons why and what you can do about it.
What makes my phone get hot?
Your phone uses a lithium-ion battery, and like all batteries, it has an internal resistance. What that means is when you use it, it consumes a tiny amount of electricity and produces heat with it. So during regular use, it may feel warm but usually isn’t very noticeable.
The energy consumed by the battery is proportional to how much you use. So, during heavy use, when you’re pulling lots of energy out of your battery, the battery also produces more heat. That’s to say, one of the main reasons your phone gets hot is that it’s consuming a lot of energy from the battery.
Heavy use includes things like streaming high-definition video over a mobile connection or downloading large files. Anything that pushes your phone to use a lot of its resources continuously for an extended period.
During heavy use, the power drawn from the battery is also going somewhere to do work, like on your screen or in your processor. These components also create heat when heavily used and will produce more as they are pushed harder.
Background applications
One of the causes of this can be running too many applications all at the same time. When we use our phones, it isn’t always clear how to close a program properly when we’re done with it. So we end up unknowingly leaving it open with it running in the background for extended periods.
By doing this, the number of running applications that we don’t notice continues to build up until their collection consumes a substantial amount of the computing power in the phone. As a consequence, they’re also consuming a lot of energy.
When this happens, your phone will be warm or hot, feel slow or sluggish to use, and the additional processing will reduce your battery life.
Viruses
Viruses can be a terrible plague on your mobile device. Not only can they compromise your data, but they can hijack your phone for tasks that require a lot of computing power. Heavy computing demands make your battery run hot and dramatically reduce your battery life.
In fact, the type that hijacks your phone for its computing power is the most parasitic kind of virus is. Once the criminal controls your device, it gets used to completing intensive tasks like breaking passwords or mining cryptocurrency.
Age or number of charges
A fact of life with batteries is as they age, the internal resistance gets larger. Lithium-ion batteries are no different in this respect. However, as the internal resistance changes, the amount of heat produced during regular use increases, and the heat produced during heavy use is even more significant.
Lithium-ion batteries don’t age noticeably with time, but they do age with charges. In other words, they wear out with use. Typically they will last between 300 and 500 charges before people should replace them. So if you charge your battery every day, 365 days in a year, you’re wearing out your battery fast.
At this rate, by the time you get halfway through the second year, your battery will have noticeably less run time. So the process that’s taking place is the amount of energy it can hold is going down, while at the same time the internal resistance is going up.
The result is, once your phone is over a year old, assuming you charge it every day, repeated charging will significantly reduce the battery life. As part of this degrading process, the internal resistance will be higher therefore, your battery will generally run hotter.
How do I stop my phone from getting really hot?
When it comes to heavy use, I typically won’t compromise. Yes, my phone will get hot, but I bought it to use it, not keep it on a shelf. If I want to watch a movie or some YouTube, I will. You may want to curb some of your usages, but that’s up to you.
Close background applications
An easy win in terms of reducing how much heat your phone makes is to close apps frequently. Both android and iPhones have methods for doing this.
iPhone – From the bottom of the home screen, touch, swipe up, and briefly hold. When the leaf roll of apps appears, you can scroll right or left to find the app you want to close. Swipe the app up to close it.
Android – Varies from model to model. You can do it from the Settings menu in almost all cases. On my phone, I can access it by swiping from side to side over my home button. Some models will have a button specifically for accessing it, while others use a similar gesture used on the iPhone.
If that seems like too much trouble, a shortcut around this is to turn off your device and turn it back on. Performing a reset will close any of the stubborn apps letting you start over fresh.
Install anti-virus
You can manage viruses by using an anti-virus program for your phone. Yes, they make that. I prefer McAfee for my computers and mobile devices. They have one of the most considerable install bases globally, which means they have an incredible amount of data available to perfect their tools.
If you would like to have excellent protection for your devices, you can check out McAfee here.
Maximize the useful life of your battery
When it comes to extending the battery lifecycle of your device, there isn’t much you can do other than reduce the number of times that you charge it. So if your battery still has lots of charge at the end of the day, perhaps put off recharging it until the battery charge gets lower.
This strategy works because your battery’s ‘age’ or total wear is determined by the number of charges it has experienced. Therefore, your battery will have a longer lifecycle overall if you can extend the time between charges. Very often, a new phone will last two days or more between charges.
Of course, this varies with how much you use it and what apps you have installed, but the idea is it’s likely possible for you to extend the run time longer than a day.