ElI5 why is the ‘cache’ this all powerful crasher of apps and causer of problems? Why does clearing it fix things?

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ElI5 why is the ‘cache’ this all powerful crasher of apps and causer of problems? Why does clearing it fix things?

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Cache is all the temporary files an app creates. For browsers that is saving copies of the websites you’re visiting so it doesn’t have to keep requesting the same pages/images/etc over and over again (web pages actually tell the browser of they should be saved like this and for how long).

For mobile apps it’s really anything they might need to store that doesn’t all fit in RAM.

If something bad gets written to the cache (say a webpage is down and the broken requests get cached, or an app crashes in a way that writes bad data in the cache) then this could cause problems for the app. As cache is only meant to be temporary if you clear it the app will happily reload whatever it needs, potentially fixing a previous problem.

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