Tip: What to do When Your iPhone App Freezes
A frozen iPhone game is a huge bummer. You lose your spot and have to start a level over again, get thrown out of your enjoyment, and feel angry that technology has failed you. Thankfully, there’s several steps you can try to make things run more smoothly on your phone and prevent the game from freezing again.
Restart the App
The simplest answer when an app freezes is to restart the app. To do this, double tap your home button. You’ll be able to swipe sideways through windows of every app your phone currently has open. Find the frozen game, and swipe it up. That will close the app and restart it. Hit the home button again to go back to the home screen, and then re-open the app.
Update the App
It’s easy to keep clicking “later” when an app tells you it has an update available. Forget to update for too long, though, and the app might start misbehaving. Sometimes the version you have downloaded has a glitch that the company has since fixed, therefore by installing the update the app now runs smoother.
Head to the App store and then click on “Updates” in the bottom right corner of your screen. Scroll through the list of available updates until you find the game that keeps freezing, then update it. Playing the updated version should be much smoother.
Update Your Operating System
Maybe the reverse problem is true: Your game is updated but your iOS isn’t. Developers change their games to be compatible with the latest versions of iOS, and if the two are out of sync, things could potentially go wrong. Go to Settings, then General, and then click “Software Update.” Once that’s done, try playing the game again. If it was a compatibility issue, having both the game and iOS updated to their current versions will solve it.
Free up Some Storage Space
Sometimes a phone with nearly full storage won’t run as quickly as a phone with lots of space. You can attack a storage problem in several ways. First, put your photos somewhere other than in your phone’s storage. Cloud back-ups or external hard drives are great options.

Image via Flickr by liewcf
Next, clear any old text message threads that are taking up space on your phone. Then, find out which apps take up the most storage space on your phone. Go to Settings > General > Storage & iCoud Usage. Under Storage, tap Manage Storage. You’ll see a long list of apps with the biggest ones first. Delete and re-install these to clear out the unwanted data.
Reset Your Phone
Before you try this, turn your phone off and back on again to see if that helps. Doing a factory reset is always a last resort, as you have to back up your data before you can wipe the phone clean. When something seriously glitchy is happening with an iPhone, sometimes a reset is the only thing you can do. Try to reset your iPhone to eliminate any stray data or malicious apps that are preventing it from working properly.
Once you’ve done the factory reset, you can restore your phone’s photos, text messages, notes and the likes. Just select “Restore from iCloud Backup” (or “Restore from iTunes Backup” if you backed up on your computer), and your phone will be back to your original settings. After this, give the glitchy app or game again to see if this solved the issue.
Not every app is created equal, and some are more prone to freezing than others. Most of the time, one of these steps will fix whatever issue was causing the game to freeze, leaving you with a clean playing field from now on.