Myth-busting: Do you really need to restart your phone regularly?

Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority

It seems to be a universally accepted fact that you should restart your smartphone regularly. Almost every source, from manufacturers and service providers to tech experts and journalists, advises you to do it, and many modern handsets even have a feature to automate regular restarts. But is it true? Have you ever taken your phone to be repaired only to be told it’s dead because you failed to reset the system with sufficient frequency?

The more we thought about it, the more we wondered if this might be a bit of a myth. We’re not suggesting it is some sort of deep-state conspiracy or cover-up — perhaps it started circulating as common-sense advice many years ago without anyone stopping to consider if it’s still helpful today. Let’s look at the evidence.

Restart your phone, says the NSA

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” is such a tech support catchphrase that it was parodied in UK sitcom The IT Crowd. We all know there’s truth to it if you have an immediate problem, such as your phone freezing or not charging. Rebooting your phone resets all the processes and gives the system a chance to start from scratch. But what we’re talking about is turning your phone off and on again when everything appears to be running smoothly. Do regular restarts also help in that situation? Does your phone enjoy a power nap as much as we do?

If you Google it, you’ll find every site suggesting that a regular restart of your phone can help. Most sources agree that a reboot every week or two is sufficient, although some even say that a daily restart is good practice.

The NSA gives the same advice.

Most strikingly, the National Security Agency (NSA) gives the same advice. It seems that quite a lot of the online opinion stems from this US government approach. The NSA Mobile Devices Best Practices document includes the suggestion that you “power the device off and on weekly,” with the chart on the second page indicating that this can “sometimes” combat spearfishing attacks and zero-click exploits.

Security isn’t the only benefit touted by the experts. For example, tech repair specialist Asurion mentions the NSA’s advice but also cites some other benefits that seem to be widely agreed upon. They include reduced hardware damage over time, improved performance, and extended battery life. The common thread is that restarting clears out temporary files, cached data, and background processes, which takes some strain off several aspects of your phone’s system.

All sounds good, doesn’t it? The experts say you’ll have a faster phone, a longer battery life, and better security. You can thank them later. Except, how will you know if they helped you?

A digital placebo?

Ryan Haines / Android Authority

Tech may be our thing, but we don’t claim to have the intricate engineering knowledge of some of these specialists. As such, we’re not here to tell you that they’re definitely wrong. Restarting your phone regularly might be good advice, and it doesn’t take long. At best, you’d think that it can’t hurt.

But the thing is, it’s very difficult to know how true all these benefits are. Sound as this advice might be, it seems theoretical.

Of the many websites advising you to restart your phone regularly, we haven’t yet seen one that has definitively proven the reboot theory. We don’t blame them — it would be the most arduous of comparison tests. You’d have to run two identical handsets with the same settings and apps for months or even years, restarting one regularly and not the other. We’re not going to spend our time conducting this experiment either, but we’re not the ones making the restart claim.

Modern phones have got optimization down to a fine art.

Could the advice be based on anecdotal and incomplete evidence? For example, there will be instances when you’ve restarted your phone and noticed a performance boost. This could easily be related to a specific app not operating effectively, and the faster performance would be short-lived before the system slows down again. Restarting can be a quick fix that papers over the cracks of the problem, but the actual solution lies in resolving whatever system conflict is being caused by the app. And if you don’t notice an immediate improvement in the performance after a scheduled restart, you’re not getting one.

Might it help your battery health? Perhaps, but this is the most difficult metric to measure without a side-by-side test, as batteries degrade over time anyway. As for managing resources and memory efficiently, modern phones have got optimization down to a fine art. Both Android and iOS have sophisticated systems to automatically close inactive apps, clear cache, and optimize memory, all without requiring a system restart. It’s not even necessary to manually close apps anymore because memory management has become so good!

If anecdotal evidence is sufficient, we work with many smartphones and other devices. Many members of the Android Authority team often have phones running for weeks or months without a restart, often while running benchmarks, tests, and beta apps — the perfect conditions to cause problems on paper — and they still don’t feel the handsets are suffering because of it. We suspect that you’ve done the same. As we said at the top, we’ve never heard of a problem that a technician has diagnosed as being caused by a lack of reboots.

Should you restart your phone regularly?

Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority

I’m encouraged to drink kombucha every morning because I’m told it’s good for me. It might be, but how would I ever know? I was fine before, and I’m fine now. When it comes to restarting your phone regularly, it feels like we’re in the same boat.

In fairness to the experts in the matter, they’re not trying to sell you anything here. It isn’t a plot by Big Restart to get you addicted to rebooting your phone. They might be right, and if you want to restart regularly, go for it. There’s very little evidence that it can actually harm your phone to do so.

We’d suggest you’re equally fine not to. We don’t know the definitive truth of the matter, but we strongly suspect that the boffins don’t either.

At the end of the day, the only thing we can say for sure is that it really can’t matter that much. It isn’t critical to your phone’s health. You’re much more likely to fall victim to a hack, get a virus, drop your phone in the sink, and so on. It seems the best case is that you’ll get a slight optimization, and there are bigger things to worry about in life — rich advice from a guy who’s just written 1,000 words about restarting your phone.