5 Ways to Make Your Smartphone Faster

A slow smartphone leads to frustration, whether you're booting up an online game or checking your text messages. However, you don't have to give up on your phone just because it's gotten a little lethargic. Instead, try these safe, simple hacks to make your smartphone faster.

Remove Transition Animations

Image via Flickr by Janitors

You might have noticed that your iPhone produces animated transitions between screens. While these animations might seem simple, they can slow down your phone when you need its memory most. Fortunately, you can disable animations in iOS 7, which will free up memory for other tasks. This process will also remove the parallax effects from icons and other on-screen graphics.

Find the settings app on your iPhone, click on the General tab, and find the menu labeled Accessibility. Just tap the Reduce Motion option. It will shift from off to on, disabling animations. Restart the device to apply the change. Now your phone can devote its resources to games, apps, texting, and streaming instead of delivering flashy animations on the interface.

Clear Your Phone's Memory

Even though the Apple iPhone 7 features 32GB of memory, you might need to clear the memory to make space for new data. In older versions of iOS, you had to factory reset the device to clear the memory. That meant losing all of your contacts, game progress, text messages, and call logs. However, the latest versions give you a shortcut that doesn't put your valuable data at risk.

First, back up your phone to the iCloud after connecting to Wi-Fi. Consider doing this once a month or so to protect your data. Next, hold down the Sleep button for several seconds. The screen for shutting down your smartphone should appear. Release the Sleep button and hold down the Home button. When the Home screen comes up, you'll know that you've successfully flushed your iPhone's memory.

Move Your Photos to External Storage

If you don't want to clear your phone's memory entirely, but your device seems sluggish, consider shifting your photos and other files to the cloud or external storage. You can do this with both iOS and Android devices. Simply connect your device to your computer, external hard drive, or the cloud, find where your photos are stored on your phone, and move them over to the other device.

Many people take hundreds of photos every month with their smartphones. Clearing them out will make more storage space for future photos, and you won't consume as much of your smartphone's memory, which should make the device run faster.

Remove Unused Files and Apps

Running too many apps can turn your smartphone into a sluggish machine. You might have downloaded many apps since you bought the phone, then never even used some of them. Take a tour through your apps list and delete any that you no longer use.

Next, go through your photo and video files. In addition to moving them to other storage, you can also delete files that you no longer want. Blurry photos, dark videos, and other undesirable files often linger on smartphones even though they'll never be posted on Facebook, printed out, sent to friends, or even looked at again.

Delete the Browser Cache

If you use your smartphone to browse the internet, delete the browser cache every week or two. The cache files take up significant space on your smartphone's hard drive, which can slow it down. You can empty the browser cache no matter which browser you use. Typically, you'll enter the browser settings and find the History menu. From there, you can delete the cache and anything else you no longer need.

Keep in mind that your smartphone might even store browser information from other devices if they're connected on the same Wi-Fi network. If you use your home computer, tablet, or other devices to surf the web, delete the browser caches on all devices to help them run faster.

Don't spend all day staring at loading screens or waiting for your browser to catch up. Instead, try these suggestions to make your smartphone faster and more convenient.