How to speed up Android phones

Smartphones have become in integral part of our life. Our day starts with it in hand and ends with it. When it comes to Android Phones, people usually say that they become slow after a period of usage. Here is how to speed up Android phones.

Android phones are known to be very customizable and also versatile.

While using some Android phones, we can see apps load slowly and also the multitasking may start lagging. This can be a problem when you try to open an app in an emergency.

There are several ways that you can follow to increase the speed of an Android phone.

How to speed up android phones

Reasons for slow Android phone

Build of junk files in the storage

This is one of the primary problem of slowness in any Android phone. When it comes to iPhone, the background junk buildup is limited as the operating system is efficient in managing this.

Junk files in the background will make the OS to run slowly and also the reducing the speed of data read and write.

Increase in cache of apps

Increase in cache files is also a major cause of reduce Android OS speed. Each app would have a separate cache and in time this cache could build up, eating storage space.

This also would reduce the read and write speed from the memory, resulting in slowing down the android phone.

Animations in the operating system

Even though animations are present in the interface for iPhone and Android, due to the optimizations, iOS is able to manage the animations in a better way for long term.

Usually when it comes to Android, things are not that smooth when it comes to animation. When the phone is brand new, we feel as everything is smooth, but as time passes the animations become slow.

This is due to the limitation in process and resource hungry apps running in the background.

Slowness due to the launcher

Stock launcher that we get from brands like Samsung could slow down the phone. These are launchers having many features built in.

Due to a lot of elements in the launcher and the transition effects that are built in, it may tax your CPU and GPU, slowing down the interface and also lock and unlock times.

Unused or Junk apps

Android phones from some specific brands come with a lot of Junk apps that we may never use. This may overtime become a primary cause for lag as they eat up resources in the background.

This may cause the app that we use to get less resources, like RAM. It may create a lot of lag to the UI and performance in general.

How to speed up Android phone

Here are some ways that you can follow if you are wondering on how to speed up an android phone

Uninstall Unused Apps

This is one of the important step to begin with the speed-up process for your Android phone.

Uninstalling unused apps will help you increase the internal storage and also reducing the number of background apps running.

To uninstall unused apps, do the following steps.

How to speed up android phones
Go to Settings > Apps & notifications > See all apps

Select the app you want to uninstall and click on Uninstall button

Clear App Cache and Data

As we had discussed earlier, cache build up in apps could slow down your phone. The cache of any app could increase the storage usage

Eventually this would make the phone slow. To avoid this issue, we need to keep clearing the cache of the apps that we use the most.

Also Read: How to speed up Telegram download

We should specifically keep checking the cache of apps that we use the most because the chances of cache build up is high with those apps.

Go to Settings > Apps & notifications > See all apps

Select the app you want to clear cache and data > Tap on Storage & Cache > Tap on Clear cache and clear storage.

Disable Animations

Animation make the phone and its interface look great. People like to have animation while doing any tasks on the phone.

In any Android phone, to disable animations, you may need to have developer mode enabled.

To enable developer mode in Android, do the following

Go to Settings > About phone > Software information > Find the Build number

Tap on Build number seven times to enable Developer options

To turn off animations in Android, do the following steps.

How to speed up android phones
Go to Settings >Search for Developer options

Find the following


– Window animation scale

– Transition animation scale

– Animator duration scale

Either you can turn these setting to off or reduce it to .5X which will increase the speed of animations.
Or
you can turn off the animations entirely by turning it OFF

Use a High-Speed Memory Card to speed up Android Phone

Android phone when compared to iPhone have features for storage expansion using memory card.

This being the easiest way to increase the storage size, people prefer doing it when their phone’s internal memory gets filled up.

A memory card with slow read and write speeds will also affect the performance of your Android phone.

Get a memory card after knowing about the read and write speed.

Card like SanDisk and Transcend are good option to consider.

With a high speed memory card, the apps and files that you have stored in it would be more easily accessible, making the phone boot and load apps faster.

Turn Off Unused Connectivity Features

If you have an old Android phone, then you would be thinking on how to speed up old android phone as you may notice a lot of lag while using it.

Background apps as we discussed earlier could tax your phone resources, but similarly the connectivity features can also slow down the phone.

Features like NFC, Bluetooth, Accurate location will always be searching and downloading data from the internet.

Turning the off could reduce the load on the CPU and would improve the battery life and also the performance.

Update Your Android Operating System

For Android users, updates are not a new thing. The issue with older version of OS is that, it may have a lot of bugs.

Bugs or errors for apps and OS could create lag in apps to load.

This could be fixed by upgrading the phone to the latest version of Android OS.

Having the latest version of Android would remove any bugs and errors, making the device much faster.

To upgrade the Android version, follow this process.

speed up android phone by updating the OS
Go to Settings > System > System update

Tap on Check for update.

If there is an update available for the version of Android that you have in your phone now, you will be notified.

Disabling Live Wallpapers

Live wallpapers have moving images and video. This could be consuming background resources of your phone.

To avoid this from happening, we should disable any live wallpaper.

If you want to disable live wallpaper and add a static wallpaper.

static wallpaper for Android
Go to Settings > Display > Wallpaper

Select a static wallpaper.

Use a Lightweight Launcher for speed

There are a variety of Android launchers available in the Google Play Store.

Stock launcher would be usually slow in any android phone.

We can find certain Android launchers that use a lot of resources, making the phone slow.

This issue can be solved by installing a lightweight Android launcher.

  • Google launcher

The above-mentioned are some of the lightweight Android launchers that you can try out.

Disable Background Data Usage

Background sync is a very important feature of any Android app or OS.

This feature helps us to keep updated with what notification we receive.

But in some cases, the apps could pull up the data from the internet without our knowledge.

It would cause resources like RAM and processor being used constantly in the background.

For this issue, we need to disable the background data usage feature in any Android phone.

Go to Settings > Network & internet > Data usage

Choose an app that you want to restrict background data usage.

Turn off Background data.

Even after doing all these, still if your Android phone is small then there is a thing that you can do.

Resetting your Android phone

This is the last and final step in the process of how to speed up Android phone.

Resetting any device would remove all the data and apps from the phone.

Also Read: How to Reset iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus and iPhone 14 Pro Max

The process of resetting is simple but setting up the phone again as it was before is much difficult.

To reset any Android phone

Reset android phone
Go to setting> Find Restore and Reset > Click on Reset everything > Enter the password and reset the phone

Conclusion

Once you are done with all the above-mentioned steps, I can guarantee you that you will be able to see a performance improvement for sure.

Getting a good Android phone is easy nowadays but keeping the performance stable is the hard part.

This post would surely help you to speed up any Android phone available in the market.

Thanks for reading.

Kiran Sankar

Kiran Sankar

I am a software engineer crazy about technology and gadget. I like knowing about the latest technologies and the way they work. I created this website to share my knowledge on latest tech and products so that it would help you guys find out what is the best for you and decide for your purchase. We have included products from Amazon and Flipkart in here for you to select.