If you need to troubleshoot battery life, performance, or overheating issues, then boot the LG G6 or G6+ into Safe Mode to see if it’s caused by an app.
We, and our 3rd-party applications that are installed on the LG G6 can have a lot of power and control over the hardware that is inside it. This means that if an application you have installed from the Play Store says it requires X amount of CPU or GPU resources, then the Android kernel will likely give them that.
This issue is being solved overtime with limiting how much power an application has in the background, but it can still be an issue from time to time.
Since issues like poor battery life, weak performance and even overheating can be caused by these 3rd-party applications, the first troubleshooting step is to find out if that is the case in your situation. You could start off by uninstalling all of your 3rd-party applications, but that might not be the root cause of the issue in the first place. So a better troubleshooting step is to boot the LG G6 into Safe Mode so that it will disable all of these applications.
You won’t lose any of your data doing this. Safe Mode on the LG G6 will just disable access to these 3rd-party applications so you can figure out if they are causing an issue.
LG G6 Safe Mode
- Press and hold the Power button for a few seconds
- Let go of the Power button once you see the Power Menu appear
- Then tap and hold the Power Off option for a few seconds
- This will bring up the LG G6 Safe Mode dialog box
- Tap the Turn On option here and then wait for the LG G6 to reboot into Safe Mode
Explanation
Poor battery life can be caused by many things such as a 3rd-party application hogging all of the resources, weak cellular signal, or something buggy with the core Android OS. Overheating and poor performance though is generally caused by either a 3rd-party application hogging those resources or the Android OS acting in a way that it shouldn’t be. Fixing a buggy Android OS is normally done by performing a factory reset, but this is rarely the actual cause of an issue like this.
Instead, most of the time bad battery life, overheating or poor performance is caused by a 3rd-party application. This application can either be constantly running in the background, demanding a high amount of GPU or CPU resources, or even a bug such as trying to write the same amount of data to your storage (like a cache). So the best troubleshooting step for these issues is to disable all access to these 3rd-party applications and we can do that by booting into the LG G6 Safe Mode.
We start this process by simply being in the regular Android OS (like on the home screen) and then pressing and holding down the Power button for a few seconds. This will eventually bring up the Power Menu where you are asked if you want to enable Airplane Mode, Restart or Power Off the device. We don’t want to do any of these three things, but if you tap and hold on the Power Off option for a few sections then a hidden dialog box will appear.
It’s this hidden menu that will give you access to Safe Mode on the LG G6. It asks you if you want to turn this feature on and then gives you a brief description of what this special mode is on the device. We just want to tap on the Turn On option here and then wait for the LG G6 to boot into Safe Mode. Just like the image shows at the top of this article, you will know you’re in Safe Mode by the watermark sitting at the bottom left of the screen.
While you are in the LG G6 Safe Mode, you will not be able to access or launch any of the 3rd-party applications that have been installed from the Play Store. Doing so will bring up a Toast message as shown above that will tell you this has been disabled. This is a good thing, and can be reversed, but while in Safe Mode you will want to test things out to see if they are the same as when you regularly use your device. So if you had poor battery life, performance or overheating issues, see if they are still present.
If any of those issues are gone, then it is one of your 3rd-party applications that is the culprit and you’ll need to figure out which one. However, if you are still experiencing one of those issues then it is likely the Android OS that is causing it and it would be advised for you to do a factory reset on the LG G6. Either way, once you are finished with this test, you can reboot the LG G6 like normal and you will be taken out of Safe Mode.
