Anyone who owns a smartphone, whatever it is, after about a year, could have the feeling that it is much slower than when he bought it. While sometimes it's just a perception, most of the time this feeling is true, and the phone has actually become slower than before .
While in another article we saw why the PC becomes slower and slower talking about real causes, on this occasion we see why a smartphone, even the best in the world, seems to become slower and slower over time, in executing commands, applications and normal operations.
In this article we see how to speed up the slow phone and what are the causes of slowdowns and performance losses after a certain period of use, which are not resolved with a simple restart.
1) The phone may become slower due to system updates
If you had bought a phone with a certain operating system, surely that device had been tested and designed to have the best possible performance with that version of the system (for example Android 5 or iOS 8).
If the system has received new updates, theoretically they should have been adequately tested by the manufacturer, but performance cannot be said to remain the same.
While on PCs this is a more negligible factor (for example Windows 10 is less heavy than Windows 8.1), the updates of the operating systems of the main mobile phones, namely Android and iOS, take up more and more space and activate new features.
Regarding this factor, however, there is not much to do to avoid the problem, also because system updates must always be installed especially for security reasons.
2) Application updates can slow down the phone
On both Android and iPhone, apps that remain in the background are the main causes of slowdowns.
In some cases, then, especially when talking about social network and chat apps, updates bring new functions and, consequently, more memory consumption.
Just think of how much the Facebook app has changed over the years, becoming bigger and heavier so as not to be more sustainable on older phones.
The problem is that app developers are not very sensitive to those who use cheaper or older phones, therefore, with the release of increasingly powerful smartphones, the apps are updated without looking too much at how many resources they use.
Apps like Tinder, Spotify, Snapchat or Google are also getting bigger and bigger and making phones slower and slower.
The solution, in this case, is to use lighter versions of the apps like Facebook Lite and Messenger Lite and to use websites instead of applications whenever possible.
3) Background applications
As mentioned above, the main reason why a phone seems slower are the background applications, i.e. those that are not seen but are active.
To begin with, closing the background apps on iOS and Android is useless and does not serve as explained in another article.
In the guides on how to speed up the iPhone and on how to manage the active apps on Android we have explained how to control which applications are in the background and how to limit them so as not to use them CPU and RAM memory as well as charging the battery.
4) Too much space occupied in internal memory.
All smartphones and tablets have a flash memory called NAND.
While NAND is fast and convenient, its performance is adversely affected by the amount of memory occupied and the decrease in free space.
The exact mechanisms of this dynamic are beyond the scope of this article, here it is sufficient to say that NAND memory needs a certain amount of "empty blocks" to achieve maximum data writing performance.
Furthermore, NAND memory degrades with use and over time.
If there is little to be done due to deterioration caused by time and use, to optimize the speed of the flash memory it is necessary to keep at least 75% of the space free.
So if your cell phone has 16GB memory, ideally 4GB of free space should be kept.
Note that on Samsung smartphones there is a cheaper type of NAND memory that degrades much more quickly (4, 000 writing cycles per cell against 10, 000 of the standard type).
READ ALSO: Survive with Android with full internal memory or out of space on the phone
5) A phone is perceived to be slower even if it is not really.
if the iPhone 7 comes out, then the iPhone 6 seems slower than before and this speech, all psychological, applies to almost everything in technology
A device may seem slower just because it is perceived this way, not because it has actually slowed down.
Usually this type of sensation occurs after an update of the operating system or after the release of a new model of the same smartphone.
While iPhones are more resistant, for older Android smartphones, the best solution to speed up the phone, if it seems slow even if reset as new, is to install a lighter custom ROM, which can give it new life.
READ ALSO: Speed up Android on every smartphone with or without root
