How to refresh your phone for better speed and performance

While modern smartphones are excellent at multi-tasking, an errant app or undocumented bug can cause unexpected slowdowns and performance issues. Thankfully, the fix is often simple and doesn’t take more than a few seconds to attempt.

Here’s how to refresh your phone:

Restart the phone

If things are particularly bad, you can always restart the phone to fix everything. Restarting essentially resets the phone, clearing up memory and eliminating stuck apps, resulting in a boost to performance.

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After restarting, keep an eye on your actions and check if a specific app is triggering a slowdown. From that point you can either choose to troubleshoot the app or uninstall it.

Install updates

Ensure that your phone’s OS and your apps are fully up to date.

To check if your OS is up to date, head to Settings>System>Software update and install the latest patches. For your apps, open the Play Store, tap on your profile icon, and ensure that all apps are updated.

Clear storage space

It’s important to have some amount of free space on your device. Check that there’s at least 10-20% free space available in your internal storage. This free space is important as most computers, including phones, need some buffer to move data around in quickly when needed. And no, microSD storage doesn’t count.

Uninstall unused apps and widgets

Remove any bloatware that came with the phone as well as any unused apps. You’ve no idea if those apps and services are consuming resources, and if nothing else, you’ll be able to free up some of your internal storage for system use anyway. This applies to widgets as well since they run continuously in the background.

Turn off animations

On older devices, you can turn off animations or reduce motion effects to improve performance and make the phone feel snappier. You’ll usually find these options under accessibility settings.

Factory reset

If all else fails, you can run a factory reset. This will wipe all user data from the phone so ensure you take a backup of everything first. A factory reset will allow you a fresh start on a particularly bloated or sluggish phone.

You’ll find the option in your Settings app. Once reset, update the phone, uninstall any bloat, and then only install apps that you use.

With these steps your phone should now be running smoothly. If the phone is still having issues, particularly if it’s overheating badly, it’s possible that your device is simply too old or that it’s suffering from some sort of physical damage or battery issue. In such a case, it’s best to immediately take the device in for servicing.