Try to Keep Your Phone Out of the Sun

Smartphones are a part of daily life, so of course they accompany us outside during summer. But with summer, comes the sun: While you might like sitting on the beach in the sun all day, your smartphone does not. If you can, try to keep your iPhone or Android out of direct sunlight this summer.

Your smartphone really soaks up the sun, in a bad way: If you keep it on a table in direct sunlight, for instance, it’ll heat up your device. You might notice this in a couple ways—for one, your phone might be too hot to even hold. But you might also notice that the display dims, sometimes unusably dark, even when you’ve set the display to full brightness.

Smartphones, like any piece of tech, have an optimal range of temperatures to perform normally. If those temperatures run too hot or too cold, then your smartphone might start to adjust its performance accordingly. For example, if your phone gets too hot, then the system might hinder performance in an attempt to keep the entire hardware from overheating.

Keeping your phone from overheating isn’t an arbitrary thing: It can actually cause permanent damage. That’s why all devices that run on a chip, like a smartphone or a computer, have protections to keep their tech from overheating. It’s not just the sun, either: If running too many processes heats up the SoC too much, your device will start to slow down in an attempt to cool off. The same goes for the outdoors: Too much sun, or too much external heat, will trigger protocols to keep your phone from overheating.

Your phone probably won’t get damaged from sitting in the sun, especially for a short period of time, but its built-in protocols might render it useless until you get the phone somewhere cool. If you can even see what’s on the display in the first place, you might be better off putting the phone away until it cools down.