In general, the iPhone 4S is a very stable phone. I’ve only had a few crashes with it, and compared to my iPhone 3GS and my Android Transformer, that’s pretty remarkable. Crashes occur because third party developers make minor errors in their code that the iPhone can’t understand, and as the quality of third party apps’ programmers vary greatly, a few bugs and crashes here and there are to be expected.
That doesn’t make them any less annoying, however. Bugs can be a pretty big problem, especially if you’re running games.
If your iPhone 4S seems to be crashing every time you launch a particular game, here are a few tips that might help you fix the problem.
Restart Your iPhone. This one seems simple, but I’ll point it out anyways: all computers need to be restarted from time to time, because operating systems need to change a few things and sort of clear out their short-term memory. If you don’t restart your iPhone about once per day, you’ll probably have some problems with your games every once in a while.
You should also restart your iPhone 4S after installing any big games, because bigger games almost always need to make minor changes that won’t take effect until after a restart. To restart your iPhone, hold down the top button and slide the red bar that pops up.
Check Out Your Memory Usage. You can see how much free space you’ve got on your iPhone 4S by tapping on Settings, General and About.
If you don’t have at least a gigabyte or so of free space, your iPhone 4S might not have enough room to write little bits of information while it’s running your games. This is a fairly common cause of bugs and crashes, so you’ll want to fix the problem right away by clearing off some photos or videos.
Close Everything Else. If a game is fighting the iPhone 4S for resources, it could bug out and crash on you. Close other apps by hitting the Home button twice and by holding your finger on one of the open apps that pops up on the bottom of the screen. Hit the red “-” sign to close all of the apps that are open other than the game that you want to run.
Wait For Updates. Unfortunately, if nothing else works, you’ll just have to wait for the game developers to release an update. Check the App Store frequently. Some developers are better than others, but there are quite a few who haven’t updated their games to the new version of the iOS, so have some patience.
Have any other tips for getting games to run smoothly on the iPhone 4S? Share them in the comments section below.