Why does my phone screen not respond properly?

A capacitive touchscreen senses the small electrical change your finger makes. Anything that interrupts that — moisture, grease, a thick protector, a poorly fitting case, or a damaged layer — produces the same symptom of a screen that ignores you.

Safety

Step by step

1. Clean the screen properly.A slightly damp microfibre cloth and nothing else. Grease, sun cream and moisture all interfere with touch detection. Never use alcohol wipes, glass cleaner or paper towel — they strip the coating.
2. Dry your hands.Wet or very dry fingers both register badly. Cold hands are also noticeably worse. This accounts for more frustrating episodes than people credit.
3. Take the screen protector off.A thick or badly fitted protector, or one with air bubbles or a lifting edge, degrades touch sensitivity. Test without it before concluding anything about the phone.
4. Remove the case.A case with a raised lip pressing on the screen edges causes phantom touches and dead edges. Some cases distort the phone slightly when clipped on.
5. Restart the phone.A software freeze presents identically to a hardware fault. A forced restart — the button combination varies by model — resolves a good proportion of cases.
6. Check whether it is one area or the whole screen.A dead horizontal or vertical strip is a hardware pattern and points at the digitiser or its connector. Intermittent whole-screen behaviour is more likely software, heat or moisture.
7. Test in safe mode.Android has a safe mode that loads without third-party apps. If the screen behaves there, an installed app is responsible — most often a screen overlay, filter or accessibility tool.
8. Let it cool or warm up.Both extremes affect touch response. A phone that has been in a hot car or out in the cold often recovers completely at room temperature.
9. Check for moisture.Water in the phone, or condensation after moving from cold to warm, causes erratic and phantom touches. Leave it somewhere dry and ventilated for a day before judging.
10. Update the software.Touch problems after an update are common enough that a subsequent patch often fixes them. Check for pending updates before assuming hardware.
11. Back up before doing anything drastic.If you are heading towards a factory reset or a repair, back the phone up while the screen still works at all. A partly working screen is much better than none.
12. Get the digitiser checked if a section is genuinely dead.A consistently unresponsive band, or touches registering in the wrong place, is a hardware fault. It is repairable, and worth a quote against the value of the phone.

Tips

• Phantom touches — the phone acting as if someone is tapping it — are most often a failing digitiser, a bad protector, or moisture. Check the cheap causes first.
• If the screen works in some apps and not others, it is software rather than hardware.
• Keep a backup current on any phone whose screen is misbehaving. Screens usually fail progressively, and the window to get data off closes.

Common mistakes

• Cleaning the screen with alcohol wipes or glass cleaner — They strip the oleophobic coating, after which the screen feels draggy and responds worse permanently.
• Pressing harder when it does not respond — Capacitive screens sense electrical change, not pressure. Pressing harder achieves nothing and can spread a crack.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask