How to fix “System UI isn’t responding” error in Android

What is “System UI isn’t responding” error

System UI not responding, “System UI isn’t responding”, “Unfortunately, System UI has stopped”, and other similar UI-related error messages can unexpectedly appear on your Android device and prevent further interaction with it. UI stands for User Interface, and it is everything that involves interaction with device apps, features, content, and various functions. The issue when System UI stopped responding often appears in a pop-up window and prevents users from further display usage. As a result, your device will likely attempt to restart the System UI app itself in order to get your phone back to working properly. Unfortunately, while for some users this error appears only once due to a rare system glitch and does not come back, in other cases it may ring its presence again and interrupt users’ experience continuously. This problem is regularly defined to be caused by corrupted cache or temporary files, lack of device memory, uninstalled updates, and even problematic third-party apps that create incompatibility issues. You can follow our guide with 5 potential solutions that will fix the “System UI isn’t responding” error. Please note that the steps outlined in our instructions can look slightly different depending on your Android device.

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1. Restart your device

The easiest step you can try is to simply reboot your Android device. It is possible that the “System UI isn’t responding” error appeared due to a temporary system glitch and can be resolved by restarting your smartphone. To do so, you just need to press and hold the Power button (it is the one you use to unlock your phone) and choose to Restart your device. If this does not help and the issue continues to make its presence known over some time in the future, try other solutions from our guide.

2. Ensure enough memory storage

If your Device Memory falls under 10% of available storage, your smartphone may start experiencing performance issues, including unexpected crashes and glitches in System UI. This is why it is important to have enough space remaining to prevent such problems from happening. Check your storage using the steps below and, if insufficient, free up some space by deleting unnecessary files or apps on the device.

1. Open Settings and navigate to Storage or similar.
2. Look at your Device storage and make sure there is more than 10% or memory available.

You can also view what type of files holds the most memory and delete files within that category.

3. Clear cache for System UI

Each Android smartphone has an in-built System UI application that is responsible for the proper functioning of your display. Sometimes there can be a corrupted cache or simply temporary files that lead to the “System UI isn’t responding” or a similar message. Thus, we can try to clear it and see if it fixes the issue. Follow these steps to take:

1. Find and open Settings on your smartphone.
2. Then go to Apps > App management. Note that this may slightly vary on other Android smartphones. What we need here is just to open the list of all installed applications.
3. Once there, click on the three-dot icon in the top right corner and choose Show system. Doing so will make hidden system apps visible.
4. Search for app called System UI and click on it.
5. Then go to Storage or Storage usage and click Clear cache.

You can now restart your device and see if it fixes the issue.

4. Make sure your device is up-to-date

If there are any pending updates that can be installed on your device, we recommend you to do so. New updates can contain fixes that resolve some known bugs or flaws causing various issues. We thus advise you to check your smartphone for new updates and install them if any are found. You can do it the following way:

1. Find and open Settings on your smartphone.
2. Scroll down the list and open Software update or similar. Sometimes this setting is located in About phone section
3. Then, click on Check for update or similar option to search for updates.
4. If found, Download & Install it to upgrade your system.

Now you can check if new updates brought your smartphone back to normal user experience. If nothing has changed, proceed to further solutions down below.

5. Update or Uninstall third-party apps

If the “System UI isn’t responding” error occurs while using or opening some specific application, then it is worth trying to update or remove it completely. Also, if your smartphone started displaying the error after installing a recent application, you can target its deletion specifically. Do it easily via the steps below:

To update an app:

1. Open Play Store or other app markets and search for the app you have problems with.
2. Click on Update and wait until the process is finished. You can also click Uninstall on the same page to remove the application. As an alternative, you can delete applications in Settings as shown below.

To uninstall an app in Settings:

1. Go to Settings as we did before and open App management or similar.
2. Click on App list and search for the app you want to have removed.
3. Tap on Uninstall and confirm the action.

6. Scan your smartphone for malware

Your smartphone can also be infected with malware (like trojan) or unwanted apps that cause such issues. Although this is less likely to be the reason, we still advise you to perform a thorough device scan if you have not resolved the issue yet. A specially-educated program like antivirus can offer high-quality and trusted anti-malware solutions, with constantly updating databases of infections to find and neutralize them quickly. Manual removal may not be as effective as using anti-malware software. The virus may be reluctant to deletion or leave redundant traces after successful removal. We recommend our readers to use Norton Mobile Security for Android. It is a popular and high-level company developing solutions for various threats – on both desktop and smartphone operating systems. You can download it from Google Play for Android and run malware removal for free.

7. Perform a Factory Reset

If nothing from the above helped you get rid of the constantly-appearing System UI error, then you can consider giving your phone a factory reset. This step will remove all the data stored on your system and roll all configuration settings back to the default condition. In other words, you will reinstall your system from scratch. This will delete possible infections and clean your smartphone from other unnecessary stuff. Before doing so, make sure there is no important data to lose. It is also worth noting the names of Google accounts and other services because most people tend to forget them throughout their usage. After performing the Factory Reset, you will have to log in to all of your user accounts once more. Now you are ready to dive into the process of resetting your device itself.

1. Open Settings and go to About phone.
2. Right there, you will see information about Android and UI versions, your CPU, RAM, Memory, and more.
3. Somewhere at the bottom, you will see the Reset button. Click on it and choose Factory Reset to erase all data and get your smartphone back to default settings.
4. Agree with everything promoted and wait until your device completes the reset. It might take up to 30 minutes.
5. Also, if you do not have the same location of settings and unable to find some of these steps, you can type Reset in Settings and open it up.

In fact, you can find any setting you need using the search. It is our responsibility to provide detailed instructions, so you have a full picture of the entire process.

8. Deeper issues like Hardware

Unfortunately, in very rare cases, the issue may lurk behind some hardware malfunction. If your Android device continues running into the same problem over and over again despite trying all the available options, including factory reset, chances are the device is subject to issues with hardware. This is where you can contact your device manufacturer or refer to a professional technician who will detect and possibly fix the component issue.

Summary

We hope our guide helped you eliminate the issue and therefore regain control over your device’s user interface. The “System UI isn’t responding” error is pretty common and is usually not of big struggle to solve knowing the necessary solutions methods. If you ever stumble upon other system difficulties or malware infections (either smartphone or PC), always feel free to search for relevant articles on our website. There are plenty of new ones uploaded each day to keep our readers updated as new errors and malware infections grow.