After recently purchasing Samsung’s new flagship smartphone the Galaxy S4, I have had a weird issue with some of my beloved weather widgets not updating. I had tried several different ones and after a period of time, the widget would stop updating or responding to the manual update input from touching the widget. I could delete the widget from the screen and then readd it back, however, this did not resolve the issue. The only thing that seemed to work was restarting the phone. Well, I knew there had to be some type of culprit to blame for this behavior.
My hunch about Samsung’s Touchwiz interface proved to be true when I decided instead of restarting the phone to instead restart the Touchwiz application. After running a force stop on Touchwiz, my widget once again started responding to input AND updating. Take a look at the “how-to” shots below.
To get below:
- Tap your menu button on the left bottom >> settings >> more button to the top right >> then under device manager, tap Application Manager
- Under the application manager swipe from right to left until you have the ALL applications selected.
- Scroll down until you find TouchWiz home then do a Force Stop
After killing TouchWiz and then the system firing it back off, the widgets started to work again. I am not sure as of yet whether or not this is something an update from ATT/Samsung will fix, or if the app writers need to update code for the SGS4. We will keep everyone posted here. Check back for an update.
Update After finding that the issue above keeps happening with all weather widgets I placed on home screen, I tried three of the big launcher replacements (Go Launcher, Nova Launcher, and Apex). NONE of the 3rd party launchers have this issue and widgets update perfectly. IMHO, this should be addressed by Samsung and carriers ASAP.
Also, a forum topic has been opened up for everyone to post comments, suggestions, about this issue here: https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/forums/topic/problems-updating-widgets/
I have the same issue with Go Launcher, I have done the canceling out of touchwiz and it still does the same thing. It works for a little bit and then does it all over again.
I experienced this widget update issue also. and I tried other launchersn too: Go Launcher, Nova, Dolol… every time the same problem. I have ton reboot my S4 2-3 times a day to get the widgets working again. I think nthe problem is not necessarily the TouchWiz. Even if I force close it, In still have the same problems. nnThe fact is all apps and widgets nare using the same background system services of the Android OS to be nable to run. TouchWiz or another launcher is only the UI between the OS nand the user. So I think Samsung MUST come up soon with a solution for nthis problem. nnI still have also my old S2 and on it, everything nis working perfectly, no matter how many widgets (weather or others) I nhave running in // or what launcher I am using.
!!! … UPDATE … !!!nnFirst of all, I don’t quite understand how some can say that with other launchers there are no problems. In the mean time, I found out something: in case you have an app for cleaning the RAM, you need to pay attention to something: RAM cleaning can be also don through Go Launcher or Dolol Launcher or another Launcher directly from the Drawer Menu, but you can not see what you are cleaning. Some apps for RAM optimization can only show you the running Apps but not also the background apps and services. Those who can show these (for ex. Clean Master – one of the best), you MUST open the detailed list before hitting Optimize, search in the list Unified Daemon (EUR) and put it on the White List. You can find this service if you go to Settings > More > Application manager > swipe right to left and go to the Running Tab, then scroll down. If you click on it to see the details, you will see that this service is responsible for updating both the Clock and Weather (that’s why it’s called Unified). If you don’t put this service on the White List, whenever you clean your RAM, this will be also closed, and if it is not able to restart quickly enough by itself, any widget that uses Clock or Weather will hang and remain frozen until you restart the phone.nnnFYI: on my SGS4, it is called Unified Daemon (EUR) and on my SGS2, so an older Android version, it is only Weather Daemon (EUR)nnnnHave fun…!
What appears to have fixed this problem for me is to do a complete clear data on the app TouchWiz Home which will reset all the home pages to the defaults. You have to after that remove and add app and widget icons to the pages to how you want it. I wrote down all my app and widget locations on each page first before the data clear operation. After that all my widgets have been updating normally, whereas before they had gotten where they would freeze after less than 30min of use. I will keep monitoring to ensure this is a longterm fix for me. Might be that the Touchwiz app gets a lot of junk or data corruption after months of use, and a complete reset/clear of its data is the only apparent way to clean that out?