When a mobile app becomes non-responsive (is stuck, gives no response, but doesn't crash or quit itself), does it make more sense to say (1) the app is halted, (2) the app halts, (3) the app hangs, or something else other than the above?

Question

wach · Answer

Tech question? Not English/Writing ..

jagatuba · Answer

@wach: Yeah this might seem like a tech question, but @esl_learner is and English as a second language student so it's somewhat appropriate to post the question here, or at least I can see why he or she did.

@esl_learner: I am a computer technician and the term I and most other tech use in this case is hang. A crash denotes the app quitting completely. Something happens to cause the app to close (there are exceptions to this, but I will avoid them to avoid the confusion since it is not important the fine details). Halting denotes the app stopped due to coding. In other words, the coding of the program causes the program to stop running when something goes wrong (again there can be exceptions here as well). Hanging happens when an app gets stuck and is no longer responsive usually due to the program getting stuck in a loop or other bad logic. Whereas crashing and halting can be used to describe many situations, hanging is always means the app has become unresponsive.