Is Your Android Sluggish?
These Simple Hacks Can Speed Up Your Lagging Device!
Remember the time when all our mobile phones could do was place a voice call and send SMSes?! Luckily, the smartphones we use today can do almost anything to make our lives easier. From basics like placing voice calls to now streaming a live cricket match, smartphones are becoming more advanced by the day. Whenever you go to buy a new phone, the main features you consider are RAM, camera quality, internal memory, battery life, etc. After getting all the specs you want (or settling for some) on a phone and considering your budget, you finally purchase it. The excitement of opening a brand new phone is sky high. Scrolling through the screen at superfast speed, apps opening smoothly, makes the money spent on it feel like the most useful investment EVER! However, over time, even the fastest phone will start to show ageing.
It can be very difficult to exactly identify why your device isn’t working the way it should. It could be due to factors like an overload of apps, low internal memory, or unnecessary background processes. Before you invest in a new phone again, try some simple android hacks that would increase your phone’s performance and give a boost to its life, in no time!
Why Does Your Phone Get Slow?
There isn’t just one reason why your android phone feels sluggish after a point of time. Android apps, user data, and system updates take up more space in your phone than they used to, when you first got it. The apps you use start taking up more storage, RAM, and CPU with each upgrade. Moreover, as you keep on adding apps to your phone, the competition between them to use these resources increases. This especially happens when multiple apps are running in the background. For instance, you are on your way to a dinner party and you use maps to navigate, while listening to music, and scrolling through social media feeds just to kill time. This instance feels relatable, and even if you just have one app opened on your screen, the others are still connected to the internet, looking for updates which adds to the processing power needed and utilises resources.
One might not notice, but continuing with these practices will surely affect your phone’s performance and even its life. Now that you know what makes your phones slow, let’s look at some hacks that will help your Android phone run much faster.
Keep Up With Android Updates
Android phones always prompt you whenever there is a new update. The latest upgrades often come with bug fixes and general improvements which help your android run better and smoother. Updates are made for software upgrades, to correct any bugs and impairments, and boost speed and overall performance. But before you update, check for storage space, as some software updates can take up a lot of space, making the phone slower than before.
The same logic applies to the apps. They will work better and smoother on your phone if you check for updates regularly.
Organise Home Screen Icons and Widgets
It is important to keep your home screen clean for a smooth UX. If you have a home screen that has a fancy live wallpaper, scattered app icons, and widgets all over, it could be one of the reasons that affect the performance of your device.
Consider changing your live wallpaper to a static image. You should also clear up any unused icons or widgets and stick to the ones that you use on a regular basis. The less cluttered your home screen is, the better the performance of your phone will be.
Some mobile manufacturers also customise the Android launcher which makes the phone heavy handed. Switching to a new launcher could help you navigate better and also change the feel of navigating around. You can download a new launcher and customise its settings and make your phone run smoother.
Reduce or Disable Animations
You can make your android feel neater by reducing or turning off any animations. By default, android uses animated transitions when opening or switching between apps. These transitions take up a few seconds from your precious time and can result in slowing down your phone over time. Reducing or disabling the entire animation can help your phone feel faster.
To change these settings, you’ll need to enable developer option, then select ‘Developer Options’ from the Settings menu and you’ll find ‘Window Animation Scale’, ‘Transition Animation Scale’, and ‘Animator Duration Scale’. You can either choose to disable the animation or set it to .5x. If you don’t like the way your apps open and switch, you can always go back and make it the way it was.
Clear Cached Data
Cached app data is used by your phone’s system to load the apps quickly, but this data keeps adding up over time and takes up space. Cached data actually exists to make the user experience faster by sorting out bits of frequently accessed data so that it doesn’t have to be downloaded again. However, if your device is full, you must clear the cache for a better experience.
You will have to do this for all apps, individually. Head over to Settings > Apps and then go over to the ‘All’ tab and select the app you want, and choose ‘Clear Cache’.
Uninstall or Disable Unused Apps
While scrolling through your apps, you might have oftentimes realised that there are a lot of apps that you seldom use or have used just once or twice. Any apps that you do not use regularly, just take up unnecessary storage space. Uninstall any such apps that make your phone slow. If you ever need the app in the future, you could always reinstall it within minutes, if not seconds! Not only does this clear up the app’s files in the internal storage, but those apps also won’t be running in the background.
Install Custom ROM
Installing a custom ROM in your device not only adds new features to your phone but the right one can also speed it up. For some devices that are no longer being updated, custom ROMs are a way of getting a newer version of Android. This will also offer some interesting tweaks and modifications.
There is a risk in installing a custom ROM, though. You will need to root your phone which can ‘brick’ your device, which basically means that it can turn it into a useless brick. But if you think you have enough technical skills or you are experimenting on a spare device, rooting can change the entire look and feel of the phone and could really speed it up.
Reduce Background Services
The main goal here is not just to reduce storage space being used by the apps but also other resources like CPU and GPU. Background services are apps that run in the background continuously. For instance, the SMS app runs 24x7 in the background to watch out for any incoming messages. While running such apps in the background is a good thing, some apps will take advantage of this and run in the background unnecessarily.
To find out which of your apps run in the background, you just head over to ‘Developer Options’ in your settings page and look for ‘Background Check’. Disable the ones you don’t need and feel your phone getting faster. This also helps extend battery life.
Factory Reset Your Device
If you have tried all the speed-up methods that you could, the last resort is to perform a factory reset on your phone. This is a drastic step, but many people recommend that doing a factory reset periodically, can make your device run in a tip-top condition. This process will clean up all the junk that your phone has stored over time.
Now all you need to do is use these hacks on your phone and get the maximum performance out of your phone and make it feel like it’s brand new! If we’ve missed any trick or hack that could speed up android phones, let us know in the comments below.
