If your Android phone is stuttering and slowing down in its golden years, don’t retire the old boy just yet. First, try these quick and easy tips to get your handset running more smoothly.
Get a helping hand from an app
One quick way to get better performance with minimal effort is by downloading an app such as Clean Master. Once you’ve installed and opened clean Master, just tap the 'phone boost' tab and you'll be able to automatically free up some memory. You should see an instant improvement as non-essential apps are cleared away.
Close apps after using them
You might think that your apps are closing when you back out of them, but most of the time they’re still ticking away in the background, using up valuable memory. Here’s how to close those suckers for real.
On your Android phone, go to your settings and scroll to the Apps section. Flick to the ‘running’ tab and you’ll see exactly what’s hogging your memory right now. Just tap any you don’t need running and hit the ‘stop’ button and then ‘OK’. However, bear in mind that the likes of your email app will stop notifying you of new messages if you shut them down properly.
Disable auto sync
Chances are, your phone automatically syncs things like emails, which is a background process that can easily slow down an older device. You can knock this off by going into your phone’s Settings and then Accounts & Sync. Just tap the Auto Sync switch and it’ll go off.
Now your emails will only update when you open the app and manually fetch any new content.
Reset your phone
This one’s kind of a last ditch effort, a desperate measure that you should only resort to if the other steps here have failed. Resetting your phone to the original factory setting will hopefully clear up the clutter and get it working at an acceptable pace again.
First, make sure you backup all of your photos, videos and anything else you want to keep. The easiest way to do this is to hook the phone up to a PC, then copy your valuable files straight over to the computer’s hard drive (although some phones have their own backup features that can save your files to the cloud, using a personal account).
When you’re ready to take the plunge, go to Settings and then Backup & reset. The process might take a little while, but afterwards you’ll have a fresh, clean device again. You might not want to install any updates from your provider afterwards, as these OS updates will stack up and likely slow down your phone again.