Take on the IPhone freeze

A week ago, walking out of work my iPhone froze, not that uncommon as it was cold outside and sometimes these things act weird in freezing temperature but what was off was that the screen was just completely unresponsive. I plug it in and it goes back to sort of normal but every 10 minutes or so it freezes, I restart it, back it up, shake it a few times and stand on my head but nothing seems to help and every day since it just gets worse. I then do a complete wipe and reboot and even that only temporarily fixes it so now I am stuck with a phone which has been corrupted and all my backups have the same file on it...or it is a hardware issue which means I'm out a couple hundred bucks to get this thing fixed.

I thought the entire thing about the apple universe was that you got some kind of viral immunity in exchange for them holding you active in their entire Jobs ecosystem, WTF