15+ ways to speed up your Smartphone

Android smartphones are blazing fast these days with processors, RAM and storage type working in conjunction to make everything snappy. But often with time, many of them slowdown as more ‘junk’ keeps getting stored in the form of cached data, unused files and folders. As a solution, most of us download an Android anti-virus app that does the job in a single tap. But what if we tell you that there are multiple ways how you can speed up your Android smartphone. Read below to find out ...

Know your Device

It is important that you learn about the capabilities and drawbacks of your phone. Don’t overburden your phone with resource-hungry apps which would otherwise degrade your phone’s performance at your expense.

Update your Android

If you haven’t updated your Android phone to the latest firmware, you should. Google brings great improvements to each new release of the Android operating system, including updates that ensure stability, higher performance speed and connectivity along with other user-friendly new features.

Tablets can also run on ICS and Jelly Bean now; you should be able to update it until Android 4.1 Jelly Bean via System updates (Check under ‘About phone’).

Clean the home screen

Cleaning up the home screen will help bring down the stutters. Keeping a live wallpaper with widgets for weather, news and other such constantly updating apps, may result in lags often as all of them get refreshed as soon as you unlock your smartphone. Same is the case with keeping multiple windows on the home screen.

Enable ‘Data Saver’ mode

Enabling the ‘Data Saver’ option in the Chrome browser will also help you surf without waiting much as it compresses the page, using less data and loading pages faster. Here you could be sacrificing on the image and video quality a bit. Also, data speed matters here.

Switch off auto-sync

Most of the smartphones these days have this particular option in the Settings app. You can simply head there to take a look at what apps really need to be auto synced in the background. You can select the ones you think you don't need auto syncing for and turn off the auto-sync option.

Task killers actually make apps 'slow'

Yes, you heard that right. Task killing apps actually make it slow for apps to start. This is because some of the apps are managed better by Android when they are left midway in the background. When task killers shut down an app that is running in the background, booting them from the start takes more time. It also takes more battery.

Overclock the smartphone processor

If you know how to root your Android smartphone and have a good overclocking app in place, then get ready to witness a snappier UI experience. However, some of the caveats here include overheating of smartphones and faster battery drain.

Clear the cached data

This is perhaps the most common method of clearing out junk files and making the smartphone quick in certain tasks. You get a lot of apps for this and some smartphones even have an inbuilt phone manager with this feature.

Put an end to apps running in the background

You can also deactivate some of the apps that are running in the background. Clearing apps that you won’t use anytime soon, will free up RAM and the load on the processor, giving a thrust and fluid performance to other active apps. You get several third-party apps for this as well.

Remove Unwanted Apps

Every app you install in your phone takes some storage space and runs some background processes and adds to the data usage. The more storage space occupied or the more background processes running on your phone, the slower your phone’s performance.
Don’t install apps you hardly use. Keep only the apps that you need and if you have got an app that isn’t really useful, you can uninstall or disable it.

Disable Unnecessary Apps

‘Performance assistant’ was introduced in Android ICS to help you disable apps that you don’t need. Disabling apps is different from uninstalling apps – uninstallation remove application files from the phone but no file is removed/deleted when you disable it. These disabled apps are not shown on the home screen or app tray but you can re-enable them for use whenever you need them.

Update Apps

You should regularly update your phone’s installed apps from Google Play. Try to get updates your apps when they are available in Google Play. Developers fix bugs and add features in new released versions of apps. Updated apps perform better and faster, and will less likely crash your phone.

Use High-Speed Memory Card

The memory card is the storage space of your phone. Phones with low internal memory can get a boost from high-capacity memory cards for maximum storage space. But it adds not only capacity but also speed to the mix. You can get between 2GB to 32GB worth of storage space to support high speed read/write operations. Always go for memory cards of Class 6 or Class 10 for your Android phone if you seek performance for your phone.

Keep Fewer Widgets

Widgets are not apps, which only run once you choose to activate them. No, widgets are always running in the background; they are active all the time. While some Android users use it to keep track of the weather, and their important dates, others use widgets like ‘Extended controls’ for quick access for essential configurations such as switching Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or their GPS on or off.
They do have their uses but bear in mind that having too many of them running on your homescreen will cause your device’s performance to slow down.

Avoid Live Wallpapers

You must be loving Android’s live wallpaper feature. Phones (from different manufacturers) come with different live wallpapers but you should know that live wallpapers that are badly made will need more CPU cycles to run, thus draining the battery faster. Everytime you activate the home screen, you run not only your apps but also your live wallpaper.

Stop Syncing

Sync is a very good feature which synchronizes your data with Google servers. Keeping sync on, you can get notifications whenever new mail comes in or when you get new notifications or updates for apps. To do this, it does a refresh at every preset interval (e.g. it checks your mail every 5 minutes for new incoming mail), and this will eat into your android’s performance for other activities.
You can keep Sync off for unrequired services or only have it on when you need to transfer or upload materials to Google servers.

Turn off Animations

What animations? Well, if you haven’t noticed, your phone screen actually fades out and in as you switch from one task to the other. To see this in action Go to Settings > Developer Options > Window Animation Scale > Animation scale 10x. Then choose Window Animation Scale again to see the fade in effect in ‘slow-mo’.
When you choose Animation off, the screen just snaps to position without animation. You can also turn off Transition Animation Scale in the same way. If you are a heavy user, you’d probably notice that your Android performs faster with all animations off.

Try installing a custom ROM

If you are a pro and have a good amount of experience on rooting a smartphone, try installing a custom ROM. With this, you can’t just get hold of the latest features but also the newest version of Android version even after your device doesn’t support it.

Keep the OS version up to date

If your smartphone is still in the official OS upgrade cycle, do install the latest version whenever the OEM rolls it out. This keeps the bugs from the previous version away and brings several fixes and optimisations to keep the device snappy and non-laggy.

If nothing works, factory reset is the way to go

This is your last resort. If you are not familiar with rooting, your device is no more in the official Android OS update cycle and you don’t want third-party apps to clear date for you, perform a factory reset. The option can be found in the Settings page. Make sure you backup everything before doing a factory reset.

Bonus:

Use Task Killer/Manager

Download any free Task Killer apps or Task Managers from Google Play. Some of the good ones are Advanced Task Killer and Super Task Killer Free. Use a task killer to kill background processes and other apps that you don’t need or you don’t use.
Set options to automatically kill unnecessary apps (based on your selections) after every set period of time. Some of the examples include Update Manager (updates don’t come every minute/hour) or any manufacturer-installed app which you don’t require.

Root your Android

As Android is built on the Linux kernel, like any other OS, it also can be rooted. Rooting your Android gives you administrator level access on your phone, which means that you can uninstall the apps that came with your phone but may not be what you want to use.
You can then flash it with custom ROMs that may be a better fit to your job requirements or personality, or to enhance the performance and battery life of your phone. You can even update your phone to the latest OS or updates that could otherwise be unsupported for your phone model.

When Not to Root

There are a number of factors against rooting your Android device; for one thing, most manufacturers deem your phone warranty voided if your phone has been rooted. You also need to know what you are doing to avoid screwing everything up, beyond repair. This is called ‘bricking’ a.k.a. turning your phone into a useless brick. So think it through before you use this method to enhance the performance of your Android.

Use Lightweight Background Apps

Everyone enjoys listening to music but imagine how much memory the music player app requires to play a whole album for you. It’s the same with other types of background apps you may have. Use lightweight apps for these purposes, e.g., you can install a music player that requires 1 MB installation space (and thus less RAM too) than the ones requiring 10 MB or more.
This way, your phone will have more free memory, boosting your phone’s battery and performance.

Conclusion

If you follow the above-given suggestions, tips and tweaks will help in making your Android faster and smoother while in use. Have other Android-related performance-enhancing tips and tricks? Let us know.
Android users are very much into their apps, and we have suggestions for apps that designers, bloggers and photography lovers should try out.