Android's Potential Bit Rot Problem

I have been exposed to a large number of mobile devices over the last few years and think there’s a bit (pun intended) of a problem with Android that hasn’t been talked about much. In addition to reviewing a number of flagship devices from Samsung, HTC , Lenovo , Acer and NVIDIA , I have owned a number of other devices from manufactures like LG, Nokia , and Sony, among others.  I was able to keep quite a few of the devices I reviewed in the lab indefinitely and my daily drivers get used and abused constantly; at quick glance I have 12 devices on hand at the moment. And what I’ve noticed is that over time, a number of the Android-based devices have gotten increasingly more unreliable and unstable. It’s as if Google's Android suffers from a form of “bit rot”.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term “bit rot”, it refers to the deterioration of software over time, which can affect performance and stability. It’s most commonly associated with older versions of Windows that seemed to need reinstallation every few months to keep a system running smoothly.  If you’ve ever had a Windows PC seemingly slow down and become unstable for no apparent reason, despite your best efforts to keep it clean and free from infections and other malware, you’ll know what I mean.

But back to Android. With the first few devices that misbehaved, I didn’t put much thought into the problem because I was obsessive about trying custom ROMs and modifying Android. The problems that cropped up could very well have been my fault. What was happening is that the devices would randomly restart, apps that used to work perfectly would crash, and battery life tanked. A number of other annoyances plagued the devices too, like on-screen keyboards not collapsing or apps that would take forever to launch.  But now a bone stock HTC One and an unmodified Samsung Galaxy Note 3 are acting funny. That could be nothing but coincidence, of course, but in the past year or so an Acer tablet, my wife’s HTC One X, and my older Samsung Galaxy S 4 had exhibited similar problems as well.  A number of friends and acquaintances have had problems too.

As devices age (and get beat up during daily use), some of them are just going to start acting flaky; everything man made will eventually fail. But I’ve babied most of these devices and thought they should be fine.  And my suspicions were confirmed when I manually cleared all caches on the devices and restored them back to factory defaults (with devices that also had memory cards installed, I re-formatted them as well).  Everything I had installed and configured on the devices was wiped clean, but lo and behold they all started behaving normally again. Apps that were crashing worked properly again, battery life improved, etc.

Wiping caches and restoring the device to factory defaults on Android is somewhat like reinstalling Windows on a PC. The original image of the factory ROM is essentially restored to the bootable partition on the device’s internal storage.

Now, the problems I’ve encountered could have been caused by third-party apps, deterioration of the internal storage, bugs in the OS, or any number of other things. But the end result is a diminished user experience and a device that can be fixed by restoring the software and reinstalling the apps. Sounds a lot like bit rot to me.

If you’ve had similar experiences, I’d love to hear about them.  Please leave a comment and let us all know what happened to your devices and how (or if) you fixed them.  You may end up helping a fellow reader...