How to Speed up an Android Phone

Is it just me or do smart phones these days get very slow very quickly after purchase!? The conspiracy theorist in me reckons it’s a cunning ploy by manufacturers to get you to abandon older phones and buy their newest one. For example my old iPhone 3Gs is almost unusable these days despite completely clearing it out, resetting and only ever using to take business calls!?

There’s a few things you can do to counteract the slowness or at least reduce it a little bit. The procedures and screenshots I used below were done on a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 with Android 5.1.1 installed.

Remove unwanted Apps and Data:

These are the most effective and obvious things you can do. If you go into settings and Application Manager and uninstall any apps you never use or don’t need anymore that should help. Be sure to sort them by Size to see the biggest space hoggers at the top and also remember to view apps both on the device memory and SD card if you have one.

You should also remove images, video and music you no longer use. These files can be massive due to the high resolution cameras on most phones these days. You can either copy them off onto a PC or if they are automatically backed up to somewhere like DropBox, Google Photos or similar cloud storage then you don’t really need the device copy anymore.

Update:

Technically upgrading your phones operating system will actually add a ton more data but hopefully it may also speed up some tasks and processes so it’s worth doing I think. You can check for updates in Settings – About Device – Software Updates.

Clear Cache:

If you go into Settings – Storage you will see how your device’s space is currently being used up and how much space you have left on both the device and SD card. Not a lot of people know that if you click on the “Cached Data” entry here you will get an option to clear the cache which could free up a lot of space.

End Running Apps & Processes:

Most modern phones can multitask, that is they can keep multiple apps open and running so you can easily switch between them. However, the more you have open and running the more RAM or memory is required so that could slow a phone down drastically. I like to get into the habit of ending all running apps. You can do this via the “Active Applications” app/widget or via the multi window button bottom left of the Note 4.

Speedup Apps:

There are some good apps that continuously monitor and adjust your phones speed and give you options to clear cache etc. One decent one I’ve used is “Clean Master”.

Reset Phone:

If all else fails and your phone is getting pretty old you could try a total reset which will return the phone to it’s factory settings but make sure everything is backed up properly first. You can do this via Settings – Backup and Reset.