The adage “nothing lasts forever” applies to many things, especially to today’s smartphones.
Drops in performance are typically direct results of how you’re using and maintaining your phone. While we all know it’s completely natural for our smartphones’ battery health to degrade over time, we’re still pretty much puzzled about performance drops — especially dramatic ones.
What makes a phone “slow”?
While the answers to what makes a phone slow are subjective based on the user experiencing the phone’s performance, we all have a few answers that resonate with us all. From animation delays to app launching, here are the things that scream your phone’s performance level is going down:
Animation delays
Without being a smartphone expert, you’ll notice delays in visual movements and seconds of waiting time before one movement, such as swiping to the next page of apps.
Time delays in opening apps
We all know this — we bought our phones and were very impressed by how it opens and closes different applications. Months or years after, we’re starting to get annoyed by the seconds we have to wait just to open our Instagram app.
In the ideal world, launching any type of application should take you less than a second. If you still have the time to get a bag of chips after tapping on your Netflix app and turning back to your phone while it struggles to load stuff up, you’re bound to give it a good reset or get a new one.
You’re starting to get storage warnings
One of the main culprits of decreasing smartphone performance is storage. Many users tend to unknowingly fill their phones up with storage-hogging files, such as high-quality videos and photos, big applications, and many others.
You don’t have to be a tech expert to know that when your phone’s storage is full, your phone slows down and you won’t be able to miss the performance drop. Some users are probably used to the wait, but for ones who aren’t these signs can be annoying.
How do I make a smartphone faster?
Some people would say the solution is to drop that slow phone and buy a new one, but not everyone can do that at a moment’s notice. That’s why we compiled a list of useful tips that’ll help you improve your phone’s performance. Yes, this applies to both Android and iOS phones.
1. Restart
In almost every gadget out there, the first order of business when things aren’t going right is to restart. This applies to your phone as well. If you’re experiencing performance issues such as lagging or getting stuck somewhere, restart your phone. This should fix temporary performance issues.
2. Update
Some people might say you shouldn’t download and install updates right away when they come out, but that should be taken with a grain of salt. Updates come with bug fixes and security enhancements that keep your phone running and your information protected.
If you go through update notes like no one ever does, you’ll find fixes to issues reported by users. These fixes could mend the performance drop you’re experiencing. Take it from us and keep your smartphone updated.
3. Uninstall apps you don’t need
Applications take storage space and take a chunk off your memory — giving your phone less juice to work with. Less juice means it’ll struggle to perform other tasks. Remember that when an app isn’t useful to you, get rid of it. Completely. Do this to all apps you don’t use anymore and you’ll be surprised by how much it helps your phone’s speed.
4. Reduce animations
Remember when we said delays in animation mean your phone is slow? We’ve got a direct solution for that. In most smartphones, users are given the option to reduce animations. The reduction will result in less than pleasing movements on your screen, but you get a little performance boost in return. You can find this under the “settings” option.
5. Factory Reset
Factory resetting your phone is a great way to clear everything and boot your phone up as if it were brand new. Different phones have different factory reset options. Some allow you to select what you want to reset — which beats the purpose — while some only let you do a 100 percent reset. Meaning everything goes.
A factory reset can make all the changes you need or not at all. This should be your last resort, especially when you’re at risk of losing important data you don’t have backups for.
What if I need help?
If you are experiencing a slow phone and none of the above tips are helping, give us a call. There could be another issue that a professional can diagnose and fix at a fraction of the cost of buying a new phone. We will give you a free quote, so don’t hesitate to give us a call, visit us directly, or fill out an instant quote form by clicking here.
