How to Restart I Phone

One of the more interesting power-related features for OnePlus phones is the ability to schedule a time to turn it, off then back on again. While OnePlus phones typically run blazingly fast, you can still benefit from the RAM clearing and process killing that a reboot provides ...more

iPhones aren't immune to occasional bugs. But starting with the iPhone X, performing a reboot to fix minor issues has gotten a little more tedious. Thankfully, iOS 13 has a hidden option that makes the process a whole lot simpler. The old ways to restart a "notched" iPhone re ...more

Semi-untethered jailbreaks are here to stay, as evidenced by iOS 11's Electra method, Chimera for iOS 12, and even the new bootrom-based Checkra1n tool for iOS 13. While not as convenient as fully untethered, re-enabling a semi-untethered jailbreak is still pretty easy once yo ...more

The iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max are Apple's most powerful iPhones to date with features like USB-C connectivity, improved camera capabilities, and faster CPUs. But no matter how impressive these phones are, they can still freeze, become unre ...more

Apple released the latest version of its iPhone OS, iOS 14.6, today, Monday, May 24. This latest update (build number 18F72) introduces new features like unlocking your iPhone with Voice Control after a restart, Apple Card Family support for up to five people, and subscription ...more

Your iPhone and Mac can speak to each other in many ways, allowing you to start work on one device and seamlessly switch to the other, share clipboards between the two, and pick up phone calls and answer text messages on both. The compatibility is incredible, but there's even ...more

Among its many new features, Android P returns the spirit of lock screen widgets to users by presenting the current temperature and weather conditions underneath the clock. It isn't flashy, but it's a fun and useful addition that, unfortunately, does not always work. If your l ...more

When it works, Android's Smart Lock feature is incredible. There's no need to enter your PIN when your phone "knows" it's in your hands — just unlock and go. But Smart Lock, particularly its Trusted Places feature, can be finicky sometimes. Most of Smart Lock's features are r ...more

If you've ever tinkered with a phone, you're familiar with booting into recovery mode. You're probably used to using a combination of hardware buttons to get into recovery, which usually includes the power button and one of the volume buttons. The thing is, you don't really ne ...more

There is no such thing as too much space when it comes to our smartphones. Space is the great equalizer of all things. No matter how many awesome features a device has, the amount of storage space available will always be a determining factor. Be it music, apps or photos, it's ...more

Every 5G model of the Galaxy S20 comes with 12 GB of memory. This amount of RAM is overkill, but Samsung's been putting similar amounts in its flagships for years. Since you have it, why not put it to use? With One UI 2, you can. With any recent Samsung flagship, including th ...more

You might prefer a dedicated button, whether physical or digital, to bring up your digital assistant. Pixel phones have the squeeze function to bring up the assistant, but what about OnePlus phones? Luckily, OnePlus has included a feature that uses your power button to act as ...more

Ever tried using Android's split screen mode only to find the app you wanted to split doesn't support it? Even big-name apps like ESPN still don't support the feature despite the majority of Android devices having split screen. So instead of waiting for the developers, how abo ...more

There is something about being reminded about something you already know that is annoying beyond belief. It's like someone telling you that your shoes are untied while you are kneeling down to tie them. That same logic goes for our smartphones as well. While smartphones do a ...more

One of the hardest tradeoffs when installing a non-Sense-based custom ROM on an HTC One is the loss of Beats Audio. Due to a patent restrictions from Beats and compatibility issues, it's currently impossible to port it to a non-Sense ROM, but with ViPER4Android you can get alm ...more

OxygenOS is often described as one of the best skins for Android on the market. It's fast, clean, and has a ton of useful features that appeal to just about everyone. However, it's also faced a significant issue for the longest time — overly aggressive battery optimizations th ...more

The art of emoji — the next level beyond the simple text-based emoticons we used once upon a time in the not so distant past. We rely upon emojis so much in our always-connected world of today simply because they help portray emotion into our typed out words. They've not been ...more

When you have minor software issues like an app crashing, restarting your iPhone would usually fix it. But Apple doesn't provide an official "Restart" or "Reboot" option (unless you count this bold text hack), so we typically have to power our devices off and on in these scena ...more

A certain selection of applications on your Android device (both system and downloaded) start running as soon as your Samsung Galaxy Note 2 turns on, laboriously hammering away at whatever tasks they have to do. While this is something that can absolutely be beneficial, espec ...more

OnePlus is known for making a quality products with their line of smartphones, but as with most, they have their own specific customizations that you can't get anywhere else. Font types, boot animations, sounds, and proprietary apps — they are all unique to each different skin ...more

Samsung's new personal assistant, Bixby, is making its debut on the Galaxy S8 and S8+. In addition to taking voice commands and performing visual searches, a new Hello Bixby feature predicts what you might want to do next with an integrated home screen feed. All of these featu ...more

With the rise of OLED displays, Android users have been begging Google for a true system-wide dark mode for years. While a system-wide solution is still somewhat unlikely, Google has given in by providing a dark mode for certain apps, including Contacts. With most phones rock ...more

Auto rotation is generally useful, but it gets annoying when you trigger it accidentally. In past Android versions, you could lock rotation into portrait mode as a workaround, but you'd have to disable this every time you wanted to put your phone in landscape mode. Luckily, An ...more

If you're on a limited data plan, you no doubt set Google Photos to only back up over Wi-Fi on your Android device. In recent months, however, there have been many complaints that Photos won't actually back up your pictures when you get back home and connect to your network. T ...more

Putting your Galaxy S9 in Immersive Mode lets you truly enjoy the gorgeous display that Samsung is so famous for. You can't have it set on at all times, however, so you'll still have to deal with the status and navigation bars that cut the phone's aspect ratio down to that of ...more

Google's Pixel lineup hangs its hat on smooth software and a polished UI. At the core of this experience is the Pixel Launcher, a home screen app that is often imitated, but never perfectly duplicated. That is, until developer AmirZ released the latest version of his Rootless ...more

With so many apps being cloud-based, cached data has started to become a problem. This is particularly true if you're low on storage, so developer Dhi decided to do something about it. You see, apps will download temporary bits of data called cache to help speed things up the ...more

If you have the Xposed Framework installed, there's a module that lets you enable background playback in Android's YouTube app without buying a YouTube Red subscription. But Xposed is not available on many devices—particularly those running Android Nougat—so this isn't an opti ...more

There's a lot of conflicting information out there when it comes to the best habits for charging a smartphone's battery, so let's clear some of that up right off the bat. Lithium ion batteries (the type used in most modern electronics) start to lose their ability to hold a cha ...more

The Pixel and Pixel XL both use AMOLED screens, which are noted for their deeper blacks and sharper contrast ratios when compared to traditional LCD panels. However, AMOLED displays still have one fairly major downside, and that's the fact that they're vulnerable to screen bur ...more

There are two things you're not supposed to talk about in a social setting: religion and politics. When it comes to the latter, though, a certain orange-hued reality TV star has made it all but impossible to stay mum about the goings-on in DC. For a minimum of four years, we' ...more

HTC's Sense 4 may be leaner and faster than previous versions, but one thing my EVO 4G LTE sorely lacked was the "Quick Settings" option that Sense 2 and 3 had. Developers were able to port it to Sense 4 for Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), but the only way to get this featur ...more

A groundbreaking new Android feature called seamless updates was announced at Google I/O 2016. No longer would we have to wait for updates to download and install — instead, they'd be applied silently in the background, and the new Android version would be waiting on us the ne ...more

With more and more phones using OLED displays, the need for dark mode is at the highest it's ever been. Since dark backgrounds reduce battery consumption on these displays, the Android community has been begging Google to include a system-wide dark mode. Instead, Google gave u ...more

When it comes to augmented reality (AR) on Android, you might be wondering how you can get those cool new games and apps on your unsupported phone. Google has an officially supported device list for its ARCore platform, which usually consists of the more modern devices. You wo ...more

Rooting is usually the first thing on the to-do list whenever one of us softModders gets a new Android device. Unfortunately our efforts are sometimes hindered by certain obstacles; a common one is a locked bootloader. What Is a Bootloader? A bootloader is the lowest level s ...more

The new Samsung Galaxy S4 just received an update to Android 4.2.2, so why is it that my Galaxy Note 2 is still running an older version of Jelly Bean? It felt like yesterday that my device was finally updated to 4.1.2, but why even bother since 4.2 has been around since last ...more

When it comes to customizing Android, there's no better way to make it your own than by installing a custom ROM. You gain new features that were not accessible on the stock firmware that came with the phone, and you get complete control over how your system looks and feels. Bu ...more

The Xposed Framework is an incredibly powerful tool. But because of this power, there's a chance that something could go wrong when installing a broken or incompatible module, which can cause bootloops or even soft-brick your phone. Depending on how bad the situation is, the ...more

The Samsung Galaxy S8's almost bezel-less display is truly a sight to behold, especially when set to Immersive Mode. While transparent when on the home screen, the navigation and status bars on the S8 will often turn opaque depending on what app you're using at the moment. Thi ...more

When it comes to modding an Android device, a custom kernel can take you farther than almost anything else. Most offer the ability to overclock your processor for performance gains, change your CPU governor, or even under-volt to increase battery life, among other features. O ...more

Changing the carrier name from an unlocked iPhone's status bar has been possible to do ever since Cydia released Zeppelin earlier this year. The application comes with preset logos you can use such as Pac-Man, Space Invaders, the Assassin insignia of the Assassin Order from As ...more

Earlier this year, we got our first taste of Android Pie in the form of Developer Preview 1. As with all past Android previews, DP1 was limited to Google devices — but at Google I/O 2018, Google announced that Developer Preview 2 would be accessible to other devices, including ...more

If you're reading this, chances are you're a softModder, someone who doesn't let anything stand in his or her way from ultimate customization. That means you've probably rooted and unlocked the bootloader on your HTC One to upgrade to the Google Play Edition ROM or CyanogenMo ...more

Root, TWRP, Xposed, Magisk, custom ROMs — before you can have any of these, the first thing you should do is unlock your bootloader. Thankfully, the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL are some of the most modder-friendly phones out there, so you only need to send a single fastboot command ...more

Like last year's beta release of Android Pie, Google has allowed the Android Q Developer Previews to support some non-Pixel devices. Announced at Google I/O 2019, there are 15 non-Pixel smartphones eligible for the Android 10 Beta, including 2017's Essential PH-1. With a few ...more

Rooting usually means sacrifice. With most root methods, you lose access to apps like Netflix and Android Pay when SafetyNet gets tripped. More importantly, you lose the ability to accept OTA updates, forcing you to manually flash new Android versions. But there's a way around ...more

The LG V30 is an amazing device that will contend for best smartphone of 2017. It has all the major features you'd expect from a high-end flagship, and it even includes what's become a rare commodity these days — a headphone jack. However, for the purists out there, the LG UX ...more

When it comes to modifying Android, the single, most powerful tool available is TWRP custom recovery. It's even more capable than simple root access when it comes to changing the look and feel of your software, and you can even use TWRP to root your device in a few simple step ...more

There are a number of options and hidden menus within Android that provide users more control over their device. With this control, you can better manage how your phone operates. We came up with a list of tips and shortcuts that, when used, will slowly put you on a path to bec ...more

If you're using a VPN-based ad blocker with full HTTPS functionality on a Samsung phone, you'll get a notification informing you there's a third-party security certificate in use. No big deal, except it shows up every time you restart the phone. Samsung isn't alone in this typ ...more

Google doesn't get enough credit for it, but they definitely make some of the best phones for rooting and modding. Heck, if you want to replace the entire operating system on a Pixel, you can do it pretty easily. It all starts with the bootloader. On Android, the bootloader i ...more

Google has recently been pushing to replace the decades-old messaging technology we've been stuck with. SMS was never meant to handle the high-quality multimedia content we consume with our smartphones today, so in comes RCS, which is a universal platform that aims to change o ...more