While I was browsing the internet on my phone I recently noticed that it was getting a bit slower. Now, the reason why that annoyed me was that my phone was not even 4 months old. What will happen when it’s going to be older than a year. Will I have to buy a new phone even though I was trying to hold off buying a new phone for 2 years?
There isn’t one easy fix but actually there are a few things you can try that will certainly speed up your phone. Continue reading to find tips and tricks on how to speed up your phone.
Restart Your Phone
Let’s start off easy. Sometimes, restarting your phone is all you need to fix an issue. Restarting your phone will give it a fresh start.
Free Up Space
Next up is checking your phone storage. If your phone’s internal storage is full or almost full, you will have to free up some space that your phone needs to work properly. You can do it manually or by using an app. The app that I’ve been using for a couple of years now and I really like for clearing up unwanted photos, documents and cache is Clean Master. It’s a great app for Android phones and it has a free version and a paid version. The lite Clean Master version should fit your needs as it’s efficient enough but if you don’t want ads, you could go for a paid version.
Check For System Updates
In general, system updates bring bug fixes and performance enhancements. In the case of Apple, well, it gets complicated. They recently admitted that they were slowing down older phones on purpose! That’s right, the conspiracy was true. And it’s not just Apple, when I updated my Xiaomi phone with a bigger, milestone update, oh boy, did it slow down considerably. In the case of Apple, there is actually an easy fix to that, albeit not a free one. You can go to your Apple dealer and replace a battery. That’s right. As Tim Cook, the Apple CEO, basically told investors that users who realized they can replace the battery on their older iPhone and maintain a good performance on their phone that would otherwise be artificially throttled simply chose to continue using that phone and not buy a new one.
Free Up Your RAM
Having multiple applications running in your background can certainly help when using a couple of them back to back but those same background apps can slow down your phone as well if there’s too many of them. Android does a pretty good job managing the memory but it doesn’t hurt to close apps that are running in the background especially if you’re not going to use them anytime soon.
Clean Your Home
It is important to clean your home and the same applies to your smartphones as well as having too many widgets can certainly slow down your phone.
If you have a live wallpaper covered with widgets that show you the weather forecast, news, social feeds etc, you are giving your phone a hard time. It also slows down the time it takes to swipe through your screens.
Use Data Saver
To speed up your browsing experience turn on data saver on Chrome. This will compress images and make them look slightly worse but your browsing experience should be better with faster loading times and lower data usage. Also, a new feature in iOS 13 allows you to slow down your data usage. So before you reach your limit for the month, you could simply turn on Low Data Mode.
Perform A Factory Reset
This will probably be your last resort as it will remove all the data from your phone. It is really important to do a backup of photos, documents and contacts. Android and iPhones backup your data on a regular basis as do Google Photos, Google Docs and similar widely used applications. Make sure to check that all your important files are backed up safely before doing a factory reset.
After doing the reset your phone will once again be a blank slate. You can then re-upload your files. If an app was slowing down your phone is reinstalled, that app will once again start slowing down your phone so you might want to reinstall apps one by one and see if you can identify the culprit.
Conclusion
There are you have it, folks. Reasons why your phone is so slow and tips and tricks on how to restore its speediness. Your phones are basically small computers you are carrying in your pockets and as we all know computers slow down significantly over time as well. Sometimes it’s just easier to buy a new phone or computer and there’s always that small adrenaline rush that kicks in when you’re researching and actually buying a shiny new thing!
Tell us, how often are you buying your phone. Is it every year, every 2 years or every 2-5 years. As improvements in the smartphone arena are getting slower, people opt out buying their new phone every year or every two years. Are you one of them?
Resources: androidpit.com support.google.com
