mobile

So my friend's stock s3 started randomly rebooting recently and just couldn't get to the home screen without many tries. And it got worse this morning as she had spent about an hour to no result. The problem is the phone would keep rebooting during the GT-I9300 screen.. Most of the time it wouldn't get to the Samsung boot animation.. If I charged it, the battery logo would be shown as loading instead of charging.. After trying the hard reboot combination a few times which didn't work, I noticed that I could see the battery with green bar every time I pressed the power button!

So I tried something silly.. I kept pressing the power button repeatedly during boot and surprisingly it booted up to the home screen. However, without being charged, the phone would still suffer from boot loops (at that moment we confirmed that the pressing power button repeatedly would 100% work) . As we were desperate to understand the problem, I got to know some apps that she installed recently and uninstalled them. These are the apps that she recently installed and later uninstalled:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...roid.Camera360

https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...urricegroup.mc

https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...on.clumsyninja

Guess what?! The bootloop has not happened till now! So the reason I'm writing this post is because of curiosity xD

1. How does pressing the power button repeatedly help the phone to boot up? If I stop pressing it before the locksreen, it would fail.
2. Can an app really cause a weird issue like this? Or is it just a coincidence that the phone magically got better after uninstalling the apps?

Hope to get some answer from you guys for learning purposes :) thanks in advance!