How to Fix A Galaxy S3 that Keeps on Freezing and Lagging

UPDATE: We've recently published an article entitled Troubleshooting Samsung Galaxy S3 That Keeps Freezing. Go check it out for some troubleshooting steps that may help you solve your problem.

Problem:

Thank you for your offering to help people with their mobile phones.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S3 in my possession and experiencing troubles with freezing my phone. I’d been reading an articles on different kinds of sites which describes kind of Touch wizard problem. They offered a few types of solutions including reinstall the system. I have tried all of them and after reinstalling the system in the end the freezing appears to be even worse.

Would you be so kind to try help me with this please?

I believe that it might be the Touch wizard problem because my phone freeze anytime whatever I do, especially when I play games. The game just stop in a certain moment and nothing moves. And phone screen don’t reacting to my touch at all. Sometimes a sound continues for a while but usually stops afterwards. And there is nothing I can do just restart the system.

After restart it’s usually working very well but within a few minutes of gaming its gonna freeze again.

I would really appreciate if you could advise me how to solve this problem.

I’m sorry for any inconveniences with reading my email caused by my language barriers.

Thank you very much.

Kind regards

Martin

Not all freezing problems or issues related to Galaxy S3′s performance are caused by TouchWiz but I could say there are a lot of users who reported to have solve their problems by getting rid of TW Launcher. But note that you couldn’t disable TouchWiz if you’re using a stock firmware; you need to root your device first so you could disable or enable it any time you want.

For Galaxy S3 units that are plagued with performance problems, rooting is the first step to resolving those issues. But you have to take into consideration the risks involved, although there are already safe ways to root the phone. But before you actually decide to do that, I have some things I want you to try.

Recall apps that you’ve recently installed, try to disable them and see if there are improvements in the performance of your phone. Some really heavy apps may have even caused or contributed to the problem.
Try clearing the memory by going to the Home screen and holding on the Home button. A list of running or recently opened apps will show; you just have to swipe left or right to close them. I’m pretty sure you already knew the effects of having so many apps running in the background.

Limit Galaxy S3 Processes

From the Home screen, press the Menu button and choose Settings.
Scroll down to and tap on Developer Options.
Find “Limit background processes” option and tap on it.
Limit the Galaxy S3 to run about 4 processes at once, or lower.

Clear the data for TouchWiz

From the Home screen, tap on Menu button.
Choose System Settings then Application Manager
Scroll down to find TW and tap Clear Data.

If nothing else works, perhaps it’s time to root your device and use lighter and faster custom ROMs and get rid of the TouchWiz UI.

5 comments

Colin mod

July 2, 2013 at 7:56 AM

I use Go Launcher on my S3 (not TouchWiz) but the freezing still happens, I think it could be an OS or hardware issue as I have also tried to reset, wipe cache etc with no solution.

Am just a layman, what do the experts say? Please help.

Fritz mod

July 4, 2013 at 7:16 AM

Hi i got samsung galaxy s3 its freezing most ofthe time for the last 3 days and now i cant open my mobile at all despite rebooting it few times the home screen is not reacting to my touch any longer.pls help i only bought it last year. Thanks