I'm just wondering if anyone here maybe has some ideas. My phone is an LG G6 running Android that is like 5 years old. For almost 2 years, the battery has been getting steadily worse to where it's now at the point that I either have to keep the phone plugged into an outlet or on an external battery or it will be dead within 10 minutes. I fucking hate planned obsolescence so I've kept going with this piece of shit phone as much out of spite as due to the fact that I'm broke, unemployed, and can't afford a new one anyway. But the battery isn't even my problem now (I know there are ways of replacing a battery, it's just not easy or "recommended").
My issue now is that all of a sudden it got so laggy that it's essentially useless. Like one minute it was working normally, the next it was so lagged that swiping down to see the menu or whatever takes 5 whole seconds. I can't type a text message because even after the keyboard finally shows up, there is like 4 seconds of delay after I hit a key before it registers. Everything is slow and jerky.
I've of course checked around the web as best as possible but the most common advice is "simply get a new phone!" Yeah, fuck off, I can't afford that. The other advice I've found and tried hasn't helped, such as obvious things like deleting unused apps and old files to free up space. Also going into developer mode so I can see what services are using up RAM or if one of them is hogging it all. None of that works. I tried booting into safe mode, but not only did that not solve the problem, I realized that even the start up animation with the LG logo and then the carrier logo is stuttering and lagging even before it boots into safe mode, so the problem must be pretty fundamental.
I doubt anyone can help because it's no accident that there's nothing to be done but somehow find a way to buy an all new brain-rotting, soul-sucking, attention-sapping, spying, tracking device. I'm still posting here on the off chance that someone might have a solution, but also just because I needed to rant somewhere and this is one of the only places where people get it about this kind of shit. It is yet another one of the countless situations where they have us all over a barrel, making us pay them exorbitant amounts for tech that's made via gross exploitation of humanity while simultaneously helping destroy the habitability of the planet, tech that they've forced into being necessary to even function in this demented ass fucked up hyper capitalist society (same thing with cars and everything involving them too!)
So tldr, does anyone possibly know a way to fix a lagging android phone?
Edit: Thanks for the responses everyone. I guess I'll see if I'm able to buy and install a new battery and hope that really is the root of the problem.
What percentage is it at when you have it connected to the charger? Could be that it's in some sort of throttling mode to conserve battery life. Not that that helps much, but you could always check if it has some sort of battery/energy save mode enabled.
Aside from that the only other thing I could think of is backing up the phone and factory resetting it. Only problem with that is with the battery being so weak you run the chance of it bricking if it doesn't have enough of a charge during the reset process.
The battery usually dies (the phone turns itself off) somewhere around the 60-70% mark, and it gets there after only 10 or 15 minutes if I have the screen on. But it's weird because when I plug it in before booting up, it will show a completely different percentage like 30%. I have put it into battery-saving mode, messed around with different battery settings and stuff, but none of it makes a difference as far as the lagging and slow response.
I've considered doing a factory reset, but I'm hesitant for the exact reason you mentioned. It's also difficult to even back it up because it's so slow, but I did save all the pictures I took on it to my laptop (and then deleted them on the phone to free up space). I suppose I will try that if nothing else works, because it's not really usable anyway.