Is your Android phone is sluggish? Here are couple of tips that will help to improve the performance and responsiveness of your Android device.
1. Uninstall or disable unused apps
Android phone shipped with many preloaded applications, which you may not be using frequently. Uninstall all the apps that are unused and install the app only as you need them. For easy discovery, you can add your favourite application to your Google Play wish list.
Each time downloading application form Google Play, will cost you the data. And this is painful, especially if you are in a limited data plan. For such cases, you can take a backup of your application to your device SDCard and delete from the installed application list. You can download “App Backup & Restore”. This will help you not to download apps from Google Play each time you need them.
2. Uninstall additional launchers and themes
Awesomeness of Android Operating system is, it allows you to customize your phone completely. You can choose your launcher, theme and icon pack. But having many launchers and themes may result slowness to your phone response time.
As a launcher is a way to, access your apps from the list of installed apps. If the launcher is not optimized, then this will disappoint you with your smartphone experience. So be picky while choosing your launcher and theme. Below are the list of my recommended ones
3. Clear browser cache
Most of the browsers are cache enabled. If you have not cleared your browser cache manually, this will consume the memory and can slow down your smartphone. You can delete your browser cache form “History” -> “Clear Browsing Data”.
For clearing cache on Chrome,
- Click the menu button on Chrome browser. It is placed on your top right corner and then settings.
- Scroll down to Privacy Configuration. Should see options to clear History, Cache, Cookies, Form data, passwords, and location access.
- Click whichever one you want to clear, (this case Cache) and click okay.
4. Remove unnecessary widgets and shortcuts
Android widgets are the useful stuffs, that makes you to reach to the important information without opening the application. They can added to your phone home screen. These widgets are getting refreshed periodically to query the data. For example, If you have an widget for getting the live football score, then it will need to refresh periodically. Which means that the widgets runs on the background. Which will lead to data and memory consumption. Delete all unused application shortcuts and widgets and keep it to minimal to improve your android phone performance.
5. Limit or disable background data
Most of the android application uses services to fetch latest information from internet. For example, Facebook app in android takes considerable amount of data even when it is in the background. It is not just Facebook only app, most others do the same. This will result in data cost as well as impact hugely on your battery.
If your phone has Android 4.0 or above you can check your usage via the OS. If your phone is not currently running Android 4.0 or above you’ll want to skip down to the next section where we talk about third-party monitoring tools.
To limit or disable background data usage, navigate to Settings –> Wireless & Networks –> Data Usage. You’ll see a screen that looks something like the first screen:
