A 2026 guide from Engadget dismisses the long-obsolete myth of submerging water-damaged devices in rice, warning against it with a clear 'seriously, don't do that' message. Meanwhile, the question of whether to regularly reboot your phone remains a topic of debate — some claim it helps, others insist it's outdated behavior.
What happens when you restart your phone
Today’s smartphones are built with ARM-based processors and operating systems that allow them to function continuously for weeks without issues. Your phone creates a cache of the most recently used apps to help speed up performance. When you restart, that cache gets cleared, potentially giving you a smoother experience for the next few hours. Android users might notice this effect more than iOS users, due to differences in how the operating systems manage memory.
On Android devices, the system doesn't aggressively purge unused memory like iOS does, which can lead to performance slowdowns over time. Rebooting can help resolve common issues such as app crashes or unexpected battery drain. For iPhone users, iOS handles memory much more efficiently. It compresses unused apps and evicts them from memory automatically, which means daily restarts aren’t typically necessary for most users.
The myth of scheduled reboots
Setting up a routine to restart your phone at regular intervals — say, once a week or every few days — is largely unnecessary. Unlike the older smartphones of the 2000s and 2010s, modern mobile operating systems are designed to run for extended periods without performance issues. A phone that has been on for weeks or even a month may still operate as smoothly as it did on day one. As a result, there's no need to reboot just for the sake of 'keeping it healthy'.
For most people using either iOS or Android, the benefits of regular reboots are minimal at best. You likely won't see any significant performance improvements from the practice. It may serve as a kind of psychological refresh — a placebo that makes you feel like you're doing something to maintain your phone — but in most cases, it's not required for your phone to run well.
Security claims and rebooting
The National Security Administration (NSA) has suggested that rebooting can provide some small level of protection against specific types of security threats. However, the truth is more complex. When you restart your phone, you clear volatile memory — the part of the system where some types of malware live. This includes certain zero-click exploits, like the DarkSword iOS vulnerability reported earlier in 2026. While this could help, it's important to recognize that the attacks in question are rare and often targeted at high-risk individuals such as political dissidents, journalists, or other people of interest to adversaries.
Spear phishing attacks, which specifically target certain people, and zero-click exploits, which don’t require user action to activate, are both uncommon. These threats often rely on sophisticated methods that aren't easily erased by a simple restart. While rebooting might offer some limited protection by clearing out malicious software in volatile memory, it is far from a full solution. A dedicated attacker with high-level resources likely won't be stopped by a routine reboot.