Tag: computing

Android Force Close (FC) problems/issues – solution

Do you suddenly starting to get these kind of messages on your Android phone?

“The process “appname” has stopped unexpectedly. please try again”

Once you get one message they are followed by others? You are getting so called force close (FC) of some apps meanaing that the Android system is stopping your apps due to some problem with them. Below, solutions both for ordinary phone users and advanced phone users are presented.

Android force close problems/issues

There can be many different reasons for you getting a force close on an app och your Android device, but one common reason is that your so called “data partition” is full. The “data partition” contains all you apps and their needed data and is located in your Android phone’s internal storage memory.

Solution to Android force close problems – ordinary phone user

You need to find out which apps that are the largests on your storage memory.

  1. Go to Settings -> Applications -> Manage Applications and choose the tab “All”.
  2. Click on each app and write down the “Total” size (in MB (Mega Bytes)) of each app under the heading “Storage”.
  3. When your done, uninstall as many of the largest apps that you can (don’t need).
  4. Done!

Solution to Android force close problems – advanced phone user

Since you are an advanced phone user your Android phone is rooted and you have a terminal app installed (“Terminal Emulator” app for instance) and you know how to get super user access (through the “Superuser” app for instance).

  1. Start the terminal app
  2. Write to get super user access:
    su
  3. Now you want to know how much space you have left on your data partition. Check out the available size to see if you have a problem:
    df -h /data/data
  4. Now, which apps are the biggest? Get a sorted list with the biggest apps at the top of the list:
    du -sk /data/data/* | sort -rn
  5. Uninstall as many of the largest apps that you can (don’t need). Another possibiblity is to try to move some of the apps to the sd card but make sure that they don’t continue to save data in /data/data!
  6. Done!

This method has been tested

As mentioned above, force close issues can be caused by many different things. However, the above method worked excellent when we started to get force closes on a Samsung Galaxy S device running the custom ROM CyanogenMod 7.1.