I believe a smartphone — regardless of how much it costs — should last at least three to four years without needing a visit to a repair center. A quality handset can easily last that long, but it needs your help to stay in good shape.
I follow several best practices to keep my phone in tip-top condition. These are simple maintenance tasks, but following them regularly for years is hard. I follow as many as nine tips, but I don’t do them regularly.
Still, despite not following the tips regularly, my five-year-old Galaxy handset is in good condition.
I’d like to fix this by following those tips more religiously, and that would be my New Year’s resolution for 2027. This time around, I’ll have one less thing to worry about.
That’s because I recently found a Samsung feature that takes one annoying maintenance task off my plate. Here is why I no longer stress over it.
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Galaxy phones’ Device Care app can automate an important maintenance task
I call it an enable-and-forget type of feature
I can use this label for features that help you automate, but the one in Device Care, Samsung’s system app, is special. It consists of plenty of useful tools to keep your phone in great shape.
It’s a shame it doesn’t get the attention it deserves. I particularly like how it handles something as simple as restarting a phone.
Many people won’t even call it a feature, but restarting your phone every few days is an important tip if you want your phone to last a long time.
When I say lasting long, I don’t mean barely running. Other than the inevitable performance degradation, there is no reason a phone should remain perfectly usable for years.
To ensure this, you need good battery performance throughout its lifespan, among other things. If you remember to restart your phone, that’s one less thing that can affect your phone’s lifespan.
It not only improves battery life, but also fixes minor software issues, clears temporary memory, and more. All of them play a role in ensuring smoother phone performance.
None of this is hard to follow for me, ever since I found a restart feature in the Device Care app. This isn’t a button to restart your phone. Instead, you need to enable a couple of toggles to restart your phone automatically.
There is also a security angle here. Regular phone restarts are also on the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) list of “mobile device best practices” for security reasons.
I’m not going to explain the NSA’s rationale behind it in detail. But in simple terms, the agency believes regular restarts make it harder for attackers to maintain a foothold on your phone.
It’s easy to enable in the Device Care app
You can schedule your phone restarts, too
You don’t need to locate the Device Care app on your Galaxy phone to enable this feature. I typed Auto Restart in the One UI Settings app, and it took me to the page in the Device Care app.
The next step was tapping the Auto-restart option at the bottom of the Auto optimization page. There are two ways to do this: let your phone restart automatically when performance issues are detected, or set a schedule for when you want it to restart.
I don’t wait for my phone to detect an issue to trigger a restart. Instead, I set a schedule where my phone restarts every Sunday at midnight. You can set your restart weekly, as I do, or even daily.
I’m not sure restarting once a week improves your phone’s security, but I recommend doing it at least once a week for its other benefits.
It’s one of the best pieces of advice to follow to keep it running in the best condition.
The phone will restart when the screen is off, the phone isn’t being used, and the battery is above 30%.
Don’t wait until your phone shows signs of age
If your Samsung Galaxy phone has stopped getting software updates, don’t ignore the auto-restart feature. This is because without updates, your phone has fewer opportunities to restart itself.
However, this doesn’t mean a newer phone doesn’t need it as much. Newer Galaxy phones can benefit from restarts just as much as the old handsets. The only difference is that an older model needs it more than a new phone.
Now that I discovered it in One UI, auto-restart will be one of the first features I immediately turn on after getting a new Galaxy phone.