Engadget examines the persistent claim that regularly restarting a smartphone offers real benefits, concluding that while rebooting is never harmful, most users do not need to do it on a fixed schedule. Modern smartphone operating systems are built to support long uptimes without issue, and any performance gains from rebooting tend to be minor and are more relevant to Android devices than iPhones.

The piece explains that phones build up a temporary cache of frequently used apps, which speeds up performance the longer the device stays on, since Android in particular treats unused memory as wasteful. iOS manages this cache more aggressively than Android, partly because Android apps run through a Java virtualisation layer across many device configurations, while iOS apps run natively. Over long periods, both platforms can develop crashes, sluggishness or battery drain, which a reboot can clear by resetting the cache. The article also notes the NSA's claim that rebooting a phone weekly can offer marginal security benefits against spear phishing and zero-click attacks, though it questions how meaningful this protection really is.