During a recent training session a student asked me if it is necessary to shut down a mobile smartphone occasionally. To which I said No.
My experience is that I can have my phone running for weeks or months without having any denigration in its performance or its battery life.
On doing some research on the internet and also on YouTube I've found that my advice is contrary to what a lot of other people believe.
But further research indicated that there are quite a few people that run their phones for months if not years without ever shutting them down.
I can't speak for the others that run their phones for prolonged periods of time but in my case it could be because if something goes wrong in certain areas of my phone I restart that particular area, only. Not restart the entire phone.
In my case the main areas that sometimes causes problems are Wi-Fi and mobile connection and specific apps.
I'll shortly describe how these particular areas can be restarted, quickly and easily, without having to restart the whole phone.
My analogy for this is, if something goes wrong with a particular electrical appliance in your house you don't switch off the power to the whole house you only switch off the power to the particular appliance.
It could be argued that there are certain background and operating system parts of a smartphone that can go wrong which requires the whole phone to be rebooted. My experience is that that is very rarely the case.
Because phones are designed to operate 24 hours per day, 365 days per year ther operating systems mostly automatically handles anything that goes wrong.
This could partially explain it: Android Memory Management - How does it work?
This is very easily done by simply switching on aeroplane mode, waiting a few seconds and then switching it back off again. This process is much faster than switching off your phone and starting it again.
Aeroplane mode can be switched, on most phones by touching it's icon on the quick panel, which is accessible by 2 finger swiping down from the top of the home screen. Or swiping down from the top of the home screen to bring up the notifications screen then swiping down from the top of the notifications screen.
If you are having trouble with a specific app, such as it is not responding, you can force stop that app only. Without having to restart the whole phone. Again this is easy and quick.
It is often mistakenly believed that you can do this from the recently used apps screen. However this only removes the app from the recently used apps screen, it does not stop the app.
To force stop a running app you go into the phone's settings and the apps setting. Then touch on the force stop icon.