Question Major performance issue on Android

Hello, everyone, I am a first time game developer and I'm not sure if this is a me-and-my-device problem, or if there is a hidden setting or feature that I have missed...

I have run into some major issues building my game (or anything from unity) to my Samsung A53 Android phone. I have never had any performance issues before, whatever I build runs smooth as butter for the first few minutes on the device. But after about the 2 minute mark the game will begin to lag to < 1 FPS. The FPS will gradually drop to 2 or 3 seconds per frame. This seems to be more than throttling.

This happens regardless of the project. I have built a brand new project to the phone with no added objects and the behavior still occurs. I have also tried changing the quality settings to the lowest possible (with an empty project), but the problem will still sometimes happen. I have tried this with Unity versions 2021.3.6f1, 2020.3.36f1, and 2020.3.30f1.

I have also downloaded the Unity provided Samsung Adaptive Performance sample and ran them on the phone to see if there was a heating issue. The package did not report any heating issues. Sometimes the lag spike does cause the phone to heat up, but there is nothing indicated before.

I also don't think this is a low specced phone. I'm pretty sure it should be able to handle an empty scene It also seems to play what I assume are heavy games like Genshin Impact and Diablo Immortals fine.

I appreciate any help I can get.
Thank you


Phone specs: https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_a53_5g-11268.php
RAM: 6GB RAM
CPU: Octa-core (2x2.4 GHz Cortex-A78 & 6x2.0 GHz Cortex-A55)
GPU: Mali-G68


Samsung Adaptive Performance output during lag spike shows no heat issues:




there is almost always a mini lag spike, then the big one that it never recovers from.


quality settings