As a mobile phone owner, one of the most frustrating things to suffer is have your phone lag and perform slowly. It is very common with a lot of phones, and even more common with low end or budget smartphones. There are always factors that can be held responsible for this, and the good news is there are ways to change that. Here are 7 tips you may find useful in enhancing the performance of your phone.
TURN OFF/REDUCE ANIMATIONS
You can make your Android device feel quicker by reducing or turning off some animations. To do this, you’ll need to enable ‘Developer options’ though. Go to your phone’s settings, and find ‘Animation’ under ‘Developer option’ to do this
TURN OFF AUTO-SYNC
This causes a major lag on some Chinese made phones.
Sometimes, some of us end up adding a list of different accounts to our Android devices and we allow them to automatically sync in the background to pull in new data and provide us with updates. This often has a big impact on performance, and battery life.
You could go to Settings and find ‘Auto-sync’ under ‘Accounts’ and just turn it off altogether. That might however, be too drastic for most people, so you could just reduce the sync frequency and remove any account you don’t really need.
UNINSTALL AND DISABLE BLOATWARES/USELESS APPS
Malwares eat up RAM with time; you certainly don’t want to allow apps that you never use to take up space on your device and potentially eat into system resources. Go to ‘Settings’, click on ‘Apps’ and swipe over to the ‘All’ tab. Take a good long look down the list and identify the apps you don’t want or need. If you’re in doubt about what any of them do then it’s time to hit Google and check.
Now, tap on any app you don’t want and then choose ‘Uninstall’, if the option is not there to uninstall, tap ‘Disable’. Disabled apps will be listed in a new tab, so you can always enable them again in future if you change your mind.
Disabling running background apps like Facebook can also help free up more RAM space, and improve performance.
CLEAR CACHED APP DATA
Cached data for apps should help them to load quickly, but it can build up over time to take up quite a lot of space and there will potentially be cached data in there for apps that you no longer use. Sometimes clearing cached data for an app can also help clear up flaky behavior, especially on browsers.
You can either clear up individual apps or everything. Go to your phone’s settings, then click on apps, and select the ‘clear Cache’ option.
CLEAN UP YOUR HOME SCREEN
If you choose to use live wallpaper then consider replacing it with a good static image. You should also clean away any unused icons and limit your widgets to the essentials. The less cluttered your home screen is, the better in terms of performance.
UPDATE YOUR PHONE’S SOFTWARE
The latest phone software would often contain bug fixes and general improvements, and it can help your Android device to run better. Software updates tend to come OTA (Over The Air) and you should be automatically prompted to install them, but if that doesn’t happen, go to ‘Settings’, click on ‘About device’, then ‘Software update’, and ‘check for updates’.
It’s also advised that you update the apps in your phone to improve performance.
TRY FACTORY RESET
This is a drastic step. It is recommended that you do a factory reset periodically if you want your device running in top condition. It’s a shortcut to cleaning up your device and getting rid of any junk you’ve accumulated, but it also means wiping all of the data and settings.
If you decide to try it, then, make sure you back up everything that’s important to you first. You can find the option to do it in your phone’s settings menu.