It’s a familiar part of the modern smartphone experience – after a few years of loyal use, doing the right thing for the planet by refusing to upgrade your phone annually, you might notice that it starts to slow down.
It’s easy to get carried away by conspiracy theories about why this might be, but a little harder to take steps to counteract it.
If you have an old (or newer) phone that feels like it’s slowing down, there are some steps you can take to improve things. Here are our top ticks to hack a slow old phone…
1. Restart your phone occasionally
With nightly charges and portable battery packs, it can be fairly easy to live your life without your phone ever running out of battery. This means your phone also probably gets turned off incredibly rarely, and while that might be convenient, it’s often the cause of some slowdown.
anybody else phone been slow and glitching?
— Kristin. (@kdfrank_) July 28, 2024
The longer phones run, the more likely they are to stack up background processes that could bog things down, so do your handset a favour: restart it every so often. This sort of reboot can be a great way of flushing things out a little and can have a noticeable uplift in performance.
2. Uninstall apps
If your phone is full of apps that you hardly use, you might want to think about offloading some of them. While you’d hope that none of these impact its performance and speed unless they’re open, they might have background processes that could indeed clog things up.
While you could go about curtailing these without fully uninstalling the app, if it’s something you barely ever use we’d say you could just jettison it entirely, and potentially reap the rewards.
3. Check on your battery
Battery life might not seem like it’s directly related to your phone’s speed, but as your battery degrades many phones will start to throttle performance in order to avoid draining it too quickly. This is because most people would rather have a phone that lasts all day than one that’s a little faster.
For iPhones you can head to Settings and check on your Battery Health – there you’ll be able to see if it’s in good shape, or might require replacing – and Androids will likely have a similar function. A fresh battery that doesn’t require any management could free your phone up to run at full speed without any downsides.
4. Keep things simple
If your phone is starting to feel sluggish, you might want to lighten the load on it by reducing how much you use fancy newer features. On an iPhone, this might mean removing widgets from your home screens or lock screen – these require a lot of constant refreshing to keep them accurate, and might well slow things down.
That said, it’s still worth keeping up with the latest updates – if your phone can install a software update, we’d recommend doing so. This will keep its security tight, but also can sometimes bring performance enhancements as software gets more efficient.
5. Clear your browser or app cache
This is an old school tip that still works – if you’re finding that web browsing, in particular, makes your phone feel slow, it could be because of the amount of cached information and data it’s retaining.
You can only delete this cache on a per-browser basis, but it’s really easy to do so. On iPhone, head to Settings then Safari and tap on Clear History and Website Data to flush things out.
If you’re on Android, you can go to Settings then Storage and tap on Apps to see an app list, where you can select individual apps and tap on Clear Cache to delete their stored data.
