Making Android Faster: Dos and Don'ts
Some commonly followed tricks
do little to speed up your smartphone, but a few simple tweaks could make a big
difference
We all wish our phones were
just a little faster, right? Whether you're chugging along with a device from
three years ago or rocking a brand new Pixel, it's the same more speed is
better. Here's what to try, and what to avoid.
What Works
The default apps and
settings on Android aren't always the best if speed is your priority. Making a
few changes and keeping your phone free from clutter can give you a quick
performance boost.
Clean Up Your Home Screen
If your phone has a slower
processor or is light on RAM, then maintaining a lean home screen can help
speed it up. Live wallpapers and widgets use resources, and the latter can even
continue updating in the background.
Where you're most likely to
see their impact is through something called “home screen redraw“. When you
switch away from a RAM-heavy app like Chrome you'll see a completely blank home
screen and have to wait a couple of seconds while your icons, widgets, and
wallpaper all reload. Keep your home screens tidy to avoid this.
Use a Different Launcher
The default app launcher on
your phone is usually designed to showcase your device's best features. As a
result it isn't always the fastest or most efficient.
There's a huge number of
third party launchers in the Play Store, and many are optimized for speed. Our
favorite is Nova Launcher, but it's worth experimenting with a few to find the
one that's right for you.
Change Browsers
The default web browser on
Android is Chrome, and it's a pretty resource-heavy app. There are a few things
you can do to improve it, but a better solution might be to switch to a whole
new browser.
Some benchmark tests have
shown Puffin to be the fastest Android browser, or if you prefer something more
similar to Chrome, then take a look at Opera. Its data compression feature can
help pages load much more quickly.
Uninstall Bad Apps
Bad apps are often to blame
for slowing down your phone. It's not always obscure apps, either -some of the
industry's biggest names are the culprits. Snapchat is notoriously laggy on
Android, while uninstalling Facebook could make your phone as much as 15%
faster. Try switching to a third party Facebook app instead. If you're a
Snapchat user, you're stuck with the official app.
Remove Antivirus Software
Antivirus software offers
peace of mind to Android users, but it's unnecessary, and it slows down your
phone. As long as you only install apps from official sources like the Play
Store or the Amazon Appstore, then you're extremely unlikely to encounter
malware.
Stop Apps Auto-Syncing
Social, news, weather, and
many other classes of app are set to autosync with a remote server. By default,
they go online as often as every 15 minutes. Get too many of these apps
installed and your phone will soon be creaking under their weight.
Check the sync schedules
for all your apps and set a longer schedule of every few hours, every day, or
just turn off syncing and update them manually instead.
Reboot Regularly
Last up, rebooting your
phone helps to keep it running smoothly.
You don't have to do it every
day, but an occasional reboot will work wonders, especially if your phone gets
particularly slow or starts running hotter than normal. If you try all of these
tips and find that nothing works, a factory reset may be in order -just make
sure you backup your data first.
What Doesn't Work
As well as the tips that do
work, there are a few accepted speedboosting techniques that don't. Be wary of
any app that makes grand claims about how much they can speed up your phone.
Task Killers
Task killers are among the
most popular utilities on the Play Store, yet they are completely worthless. In
fact, they can make your phone slower. A task killer closes background apps to
free up RAM. The idea is that free RAM improves performance, but this isn't
true.
Android is designed to keep
apps in RAM so they can be restored quickly and will intelligently close apps
when it needs to free up extra resources. More importantly, some processes
relating to some apps will start up again as soon as they are killed because
they need to be running in the background. This constant stopping and starting
will slow your phone down far more than if you just leave Android to do the job
it was built to do.
Closing Apps
For the same reason,
there's no need to be fastidious about manually closing apps. Again, Android
manages this automatically.
If Android needs to free up
resources, it will close whichever app you haven't used in a while. If not,
there's no harm leaving them alone, where they will have little or no effect on
either performance or battery life.
Using Any Speed Boosters
While we try to avoid
generalisations, it's safe to say you should avoid any non-root app that
promises to improve the performance of your phone. This includes RAM boosters,
SD card speeder-uppers, and defragmenters. They rarely work, can actually slow
your phone down, and are often packed with highly intrusive ads.
|
Andy
Betts MM26DEC16
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