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This is a known issue – after a few years of loyal use, you may notice it slowing down.
It’s easy to get carried away with theories about why this might happen, but it’s a little harder to take action to counteract it.
If you feel like your old (or newer) phone is slowing down, there are a few things you can do to improve the situation.
Here are the experts’ top tips for hacking a slow old phone:
1. Restart your phone occasionally
With nightly charging and portable battery packs, you can pretty easily live your life without your phone ever running out of battery. That means your phone is also probably turned off incredibly rarely, and while that can be convenient, it’s often the cause of some slowdown.
The longer phones run, the more likely they are to pile up background processes that can slow things down, so do your mobile phone a favor: restart it every now and then. This kind of reboot can be a great way to take a bit of the load off things and noticeably increase performance.
2. Uninstall apps
If your phone is full of apps that you barely use, you might want to think about offloading some of them. While you hope that none of these apps will affect performance and speed unless they’re open, they can have background processes that can actually clog up the device.
While you could limit these without completely uninstalling the app, if it’s something you barely use, we’d say you can just ditch it entirely and potentially reap the benefits.
3. Check your battery
Battery life doesn’t seem to be directly related to the speed of your phone, but as your battery gets weaker, many phones throttle down performance to avoid draining too quickly. That’s because most people would rather have a phone that lasts all day than one that’s a little faster.
iPhones let you check the health of your battery in the settings to see if it’s in good shape or needs replacing. Androids probably have a similar feature. A new battery that doesn’t require maintenance could keep your phone running at full speed with no downside.
4. Keep things simple
If your phone is starting to get sluggish, you might want to lighten the load by limiting the use of newer features. On an iPhone, that might mean removing widgets from your home screen or lock screen – these need to be constantly updated to stay correct and can significantly increase performance.
Still, it’s worth taking advantage of the latest updates. If your phone is capable of installing a software update, we recommend doing so. This will keep things secure, and sometimes you can also get performance improvements as the software becomes more efficient.
5. Clear your browser or app cache
This is a tried and tested tip that still works: If you notice that your phone is getting slow, especially when browsing the internet, it could be due to the amount of cached information and data it stores.
You can only clear this cache for each browser individually, but it’s easy to do. On iPhone, go to Settings, then Safari, and tap Clear History and Website Data to clear the cache.
If you’re using Android, you can go to Settings, then Storage, and tap Apps to see an app list. From there, you can select individual apps and tap Clear Cache to delete the data stored in them.
