Android phones have a habit of getting bogged down after 6 to 12 months of use (or do they?). A phone that was once a speed demon starts to feel a bit sluggish; apps don’t load as quickly, the keyboard takes a while to pop up, and animations become laggy. Many people put this down to the realities of their phone getting older, and start thinking about upgrading to something new.
But before you hand over some hard-earned cash for a new smartphone, there are some things that can be done to speed up your phone experience, and some things that do utterly nothing.
What Doesn’t Work
Clearing apps from the app switcher
Some people seem to think if they clear the apps from the app switching screen, which shows the apps you’ve been recently using, that this will free up system resources like RAM. However it’s no longer 2008: Android has been managing RAM usage and system resources extremely well for years now. The OS automatically suspends and closes apps you’re not using, freeing up RAM for whatever apps you are using. The process requires no user intervention and consistently works away in the background.
In fact by closing apps in the app switcher, you can actually slow down your phone. Apps suspended in RAM are much faster to resume than apps you’ve closed entirely. If you keep closing everything, your phone will have to spend more time slowly re-launching apps from scratch, and you’re not actually freeing up system resources as Android already does this in the background.
The only legitimate reason to close an app in the app switcher is if it’s not working correctly. Boot it from the app switcher, relaunch it, and the system will have to load everything from scratch, hopefully correcting whatever issue you were experiencing.
What Works
Uninstalling and/or disabling junk apps
Many Android apps like to run background processes. The more apps you have installed on your smartphone, the more background processes you’ll likely be running. Background processes consume CPU cycles, potentially slowing your phone down and reducing its battery life.
The best way to resolve this problem is to uninstall any apps you don’t regularly use. Go through and remove all those games you played once or twice, and all the apps you installed as a test. If your phone is only running background processes for apps you actually use, you’ll have a smoother experience.
It’s also worth disabling any system apps or bloatware you don’t use. Did your phone come with Evernote, Microsoft Word, or Facebook installed but you never use these apps? Head into the ‘apps’ menu in the settings screen, find whatever apps you don’t use, then click on the ‘disable’ button to rid them from your life.
Disable animations
One way to make your phone feel faster to use is to remove all system animations. You’d be surprised how much of a difference this makes, as many phones use long and attractive animations to improve the visual feel of their software implementation. Speed demons will want to remove these animations to make loading apps and screens feel faster.
It's typically a good idea to keep 10 to 15 percent of your phone’s storage free at all times. But even if your phone isn’t that full, removing junk can help performance at times. The best way to free up space is to uninstall apps you don’t use (as we talked about earlier) and offload your captured photos and videos to a PC or to the cloud. If you’d rather not do either of those things, you can clear out your cache data. Those with plenty of storage space probably shouldn’t clear out cache files that do help performance at times, but those struggling to keep that last bit of storage free can swiftly start fresh.
To clear your cache data, head to the storage section of your phone’s settings menu. From there, tap cached data and click clear or OK to wipe away the cache for every app. Often this can free several gigabytes of storage space.
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