Android phone running slow? Here’s how to speed it up

No Android phone runs slow out of the box, but after a few months (or weeks) of usage the performance starts to fade away. In worst cases, the phone lags even with simplest of tasks like making or receiving a call.

Why is that?

Well, it definitely is about your phone’s hardware limits. This happens when your usage of phone overpowers the hardware on your phone. To bring your phone back to its original performance or at-least near that, you need optimize your usage of the phone.

How to optimize your usage? There are a number of ways in which apps degrade the performance of Android devices. Many apps keep running in the background even when you’re not using them and eat your phone’s memory, processing power, battery and internet data. That’s why task killers are so efficient at boosting your phone’s performance because what they do is kill all apps running in the background.

So instead of using task killers, let’s get the problem solved from its root cause — restrict unnecessary background processes.

Restrict apps from running in background

Background processing eats a lot of hardware juice. So you need to first restrict unnecessary background processing of apps. We’ll use the Greenify app for that.

► Download Greenify

Greenify

 

Greenify lets you freeze apps from running in background. The apps that you freeze using Greenify will function just fine when you’re using them, but once closed they won’t continue running in the background consuming precious resources of your phone, and thereby help saving phone’s memory and battery.

The app is pretty straightforward and comes with an in-app user guide to help users better understand the app.

Greenify will list out apps that run in background and are largely responsible for making your Android phone running slower. Make sure to select the apps that you think are unnecessarily running in background and hibernate them using Greenify.

Disable Animations

There are animations everywhere on Android. From opening an app to keyboard letter pops — everything on Android uses animation to appear delightful to your eyes. But animations are produced at the cost of processing power of your phone. So disabling these animations will definitely speed up the time your phone takes in opening apps and multitasking.

The setting to disable animations is accessed differently in different versions of Android.

Android 2.3 (and below)

Disable Animation on Android 2.3

  • On your phone, open Settings » then Display » select Animation
  • Now from the pop-up window, select No animations
Android 4.0 (and above)

Disable Animation on Android 4.0 and above

  • Go to Settings » Developer options
    └ If you you’re on Android 4.2 (or above) you first need to enable developer options. For that select “About phone” from settings and tap “Build number” seven times.
  • Scroll a bit in developer option and you’ll see options for Window + Transition animations and Animator duration scale.
  • Open each of these settings and select “Animation off” to disable all animations on your phone

Free up internal storage

Your Android phone can easily slow down due to low storage space available. Apps and games uses internal storage to store data, which is why having too much apps on your phone leads to slower performance. Other than that system dump files and temporary files also eats up your internal storage overtime which needs to be cleaned up.

Some tips to free up internal storage:

  • If your phone has SD card:
    • Move apps and games from internal storage to SD card. This app can help with that → AppMgr III (App 2 SD)
    • Move any music and image files from internal storage to SD card
    • Select SD card as default storage for the Camera app to save clicked photos and videos
  • Clean up cache and other temporary data that apps often save to Internal storage. You can use the → Clean Master app for that.
  • Remove unused apps and games

Remove unnecessary widgets

Widgets are great for getting information right on your home screen without even opening the app, but it also means that widgets are background processes that actively uses your device’s resources to get the information you expect it to give, which can seriously slow down a device’s performance if too many widgets are active on the home screen.

So remove unnecessary widgets from your home screen, especially the ones which are more resourceful.

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If you’ve any questions or suggestions regarding the tips we shared above, feel free to let us know in comments below.

Posted by
Shivam

Shivam is our resident designer and web developer who also enjoys writing. He loves to meditate, drive on the freeways and hunt for snipers during his Call Of Duty playtime. Email: [email protected]