Fortunately, there are plenty of things you can do to help. Our first tip on how to speed up Android phones is: just reboot! Turn your phone off, then turn it on again.
This might seem weird, but there’s a good reason for it. If, like many people, you leave you Android phone on all the time, it will gradually see its memory filled up by little bits of memory that stick around from apps that you’ve closed. Gradually, the phone will fill up with temporary files – a bit like having your head so full of things you need to remember that you can’t get to sleep. Rebooting frees up this memory and once you restart it, the phone should be working just like new again.
But if that doesn’t work, you may need to try some other ways to speed it up. In this article, we’ll talk a little about why your phone might start to run more slowly, and then we’ll look at how to speed up Android tablets and phones.
Clean up your home screen
Take a look at your home screen. If you’re running a load of widgets – the news, weather, social feeds, emails, calendars – they’re one of the reasons your phone is slowing down. Every time you wake your phone or go to the home screen, your phone has to load all this content— that’s a big ask. Reducing the number of widgets will free your phone up to do other stuff.
Clean up your apps
Phones tend to accumulate software over time. You see an app that might be useful, and you install it, but you never use it. All the same, it’s taking up space, and it may well be running certain processes in the background even though you haven’t opened it. This all slows your phone down, so taking a look at your apps and reducing the number downloaded can help speed up your Android phone.
Clean up your data storage
The next step in speeding up Android phones is cleaning up data storage. Too much data on your phone can cramp your operating system’s style, so freeing up space should improve its performance.
You’ll actually need to install a new app to help you with this – Files by Google. It’s a neat program that can find files wherever they’re lurking on your phone and get rid of duplicates; it’s also very customizable. If your phone only has 16GB total space, it’s a great tool for freeing up space. Look specifically for downloads you no longer need, and for large files that can be deleted.
You can also free up space by using the cloud to store your photos and other files, rather than keeping them on internal memory. Photos can be set to automatically back up to your Google Drive, for instance, so you can remove them from your Gallery on the phone.
Should you update to speed up Android phones?
Many people who want to know how to speed up Android think updating to the latest version will help them. But that’s not always the case.
For some phones, updating to a newer version of Android (we’re now on Android 10) can significantly improve performance as all those tiny improvements in the operating system add up to a big boost.
But if you have a phone more than a few years old, particularly if it’s low on storage, you might find an update will actually slow your phone down. Your phone just might not have the amount of storage or memory to handle the update.
There are ways to roll back updates, but they’re sometimes quite complicated. If your phone is over three or four years old, perhaps running Android 4, it’s probably best to leave the system the leave the system the way it is.
Watch out for malware
A big reason for some Android phones and tablets running slow is that they’ve got malware installed on them. You may have installed an app that comes with a malicious app riding piggyback (that’s why you should only download apps from the official app store) or clicked on an infected link in an email. You might also experience symptoms like your phone crashing, your data usage increasing inexplicably, your battery draining quickly, or even your phone overheating.
