5 ways you can speed up your Smartphone RIGHT NOW!

It’s always annoying when your phone starts to get sluggish, maybe its long loading times or it starts to perform strange random actions as if there is ghost stuck inside haunting your screen. Before you get a new phone out of sheer frustration or call the IT team, here are a couple quick things you can do to free up space, literally right now while you are reading this.

1. Free up storage

If you have a lot of stuff on your phone it is probably slowing things down. Can check how full your phone is by going to:

• iPhone - Settings > General > Storage
• Android - Settings > Battery and device care > Storage

It will show you how much space all your files are taking up. Photos, Music, Files and Email can be big culprits here depending on what you store on your device.

On the iPhone you have a helpful option to ‘Review Large Attachments’ which will immediately show you any big files that you might want to get rid of.

Some phones have the ability for you to insert a micro-SD card into your phone. If you keep a lot of music or files on your phone it might be worth getting one specifically for storing that kind of stuff and using your phone’s hard drive exclusively for OS and apps. 

We sell micro-SD cards here if you are looking for one. In 32gb, 64gb and 128gb sizes depending on how many files you are keeping. All with a 5-year warranty.

2. Uninstall unused apps

Apps you don’t really use not only take up space on your hard drive but can have a tendency to update and run in the background. If you don’t really use certain apps, consider deleting them. You can press and hold the app icon usually to get the option to delete it.

If you want to see what Apps you are actually using head to the phone’s Screen Time to find out:

• iPhone: Settings > Screen Time
• Android - Settings > Digital Wellbeing & parental controls > Dashboard > Show all apps

3. Perform a restart
It is a simple thing, but sometimes the old ‘turn it off and then on again’ can free up speed and memory by stopping any process that might be currently consuming precious smartphone resources. Most people tend to have their phone running constantly so giving it quick shut down and start up might stop a process currently causing you trouble.

4. Close unused tabs
Unused tabs can get out of hand really quickly on your phone as unlike a desktop computer, its not always super clear that you may have 63 tabs open. Generally, it does tell you the number of tabs you supposedly have open in the bottom menu of your browser, but let’s be honest here, most of us aren’t paying attention to that.

In Safari the tab icon will be in the bottom right corner to open all your tabs, then hold down ‘Done’ for the option to close them.
In Google Chrome, you can press the tab button (the square with the number in it) which will open all the tabs. Press ‘Edit’ to be given the option to close all the tabs

5. Clear the cache
Many apps (especially your internet browser) have a tendency to store temporary information on the fly. It is generally there to save loading times on apps or web pages. This is very useful when you are using the app or browsing web pages but it doesn’t always delete it after. ‘Clearing the Cache’ (pronounced ‘Cash’ for those of you not in the know) can free up a lot of hard drive space. 

For phones, our internet browser is generally the main culprit so it is worth clearing your browser history and web data somewhat regularly.

• Safari - Settings > Safari > Clear History and Website Data
• Chrome - Menu > Settings > Privacy and Security > Clear Browsing Data

Just so you know what you are deleting:

• Browsing history - all the sites you have visited recently
• Cookies, Site Data - Any information a site has stored about you. If you are logged in somewhere this will sign you out.
• Cached Images/Files - any files a website has downloaded onto your browser to make a page load faster.

If you want to take it one step further you can download programs that do all of this for you. A popular free app for android is called CCleaner, which also comes with a few other handy features to optimize your phone. iPhone users have their own array of cleaning programs but most are paid, which does not stop you from cleaning your phone while you use it on a trial of course…

Hopefully one of these tips helped you free up some of your mobile phone resources. You can of course always come in-store and see us at King IT for any more information on how you can get the best out of your phone.