HTC Sense always rebooting
I recently switched from using HTC Sense to Go Launcher Ex. While Go Launcher Ex is not perfect, it is certainly an improvement over the default launcher. Most importantly, no more waiting while the launcher is rebooting after pressing the Home button.
Overall, I have been pleased with my HTC Evo 4G on Sprint. The problem I had is very similar to what I had with my iPhone 3G several years ago on AT&T. Each successive update made the phone run slower. As updates always promise bug fixes and new features, not applying the updates never struck me as a reasonable option.
Where Apple failed was that there was no alternative to improve the phone’s performance. There is one-and-only-one iPhone UI. Luckily, Android users have options: replacing your launcher. As it so happens with the iPhone 3G, each update always made it worse. Had I known this, in retrospect I never would have started updating the phone.
Aside: Of course, the notion of not updating the phone seems rather ridiculous. Updates are pushed for security and performance bugs.
Fast-forward to my current phone. The past few months I have experience some problems with the default launcher on the HTC Evo 4G. At first it wasn’t too bad, but for some reason it seemed to get progressively worse. Even with a hard-reset, when the home key was pressed the phone display a message while the Launcher restarted.
I am confident that the cause of these reboots in the Gingerbread update. My phone did not reboot until I applied the update. Another phone on the plan was never updated until December. Prior to Gingerbread it never rebooted. Once the Gingerbread update hit the phone, HTC Sense started rebooting frequently.
On top of the rebooting, the battery life of my phone also started to decrease. When I looked at what processes where running on the phone, I noticed that HTC Sense had two running processes consuming 36 MB of RAM each. I never did figure out why there were two processes.
The good news is that there is a workaround: install a new launcher. In general, if you have a problem with any (Android) phone, there are always some common sense things you can do. In this particular case, using a new Launcher is the right course of action especially given this week’s announcement on Android Central about Sprint discontinuing support for the HTC Evo 4G.
Simply put: the reboot problem went away by switching launchers. I also noticed a marked improvement in the phone’s battery life. Most likely this is helped by Go Launcher is its modular design. The new launcher processes only took up about 40 MB (i.e. less than the 72 MB by HTC Sense) with the base app and the extra plug-ins I chose to install (Go SMS Pro, Go Calendar, Go Switch, and a few others). Less memory with better GUI effects – score!
The downside to any third-party launcher is that you cannot get rid of the default launcher. Like the other Sprint bloatware (here’s looking at you Nascar), uninstalling HTC Sense isn’t possible. Once I pulled down the new Launcher I started seeing some warning about running out of storage space. Which meant I needed to go through my apps and move what I could to the SD card. Not the end of the world, but still irksome.