Does your Android phone feel slow and not as active as the day you bought it? You’re not alone. Smartphones tend to get slow over time for various reasons.
But before you go splashing your hard-earned bucks on a new phone, why not try a few tricks to speed up your phone.
5 tricks to speed up your Android phone
1. Restart the phone
This is a rather simple trick, but it does work. You don’t have to restart your phone often, but once a while is a good idea. When you restart your phone, it clears out the memory, and can often fix unruly apps. Press and hold the power button until the option to restart appears.
2. Clear cache
Apps tend to leave a trace on your phone, which over time can hog the RAM. This leaves less RAM to perform other tasks, and hence your phone can feel slow. To clear these traces, head to Settings -> Storage -> Cache, and confirm on the message asking if you want to clear the cache partition.
3. Disable animations
As mentioned above, visual effects and animations may look good, but they are memory hoggers. To speed things up, reduce the number of animations or turn them off completely. Head to Settings -> About Phone -> tap Build Number till you enable Developer Options. Then head back to Settings -> Developer Options -> Windows Animation Scale -> Animations off.
4. Apps
You should remove apps that you haven’t used for a long time. They will take up precious space on your phone, and slow things down. Once you’re left with apps that you regularly use, ensure you have updated them to their latest versions. With every update, companies fix bugs that would otherwise affect the app’s performance.
5. Custom ROMs
A phone’s brand could have installed their own ROM over Android, which could be the reason why your phone feels slow. If you’re relatively comfortable with experimenting on your phone, you should try out a few custom ROMs. Third-party ROMs like Nova Launcher or Apex Launcher not only change how your phone’s software looks, but can also speed things up.
Bonus tip!
If the above tricks aren’t able to speed up your phone, there’s one more thing you can try, albeit as a last resort. You can perform a factory reset, which will return your smartphone to the state it was when you bought it.
