How to Speed Up Your Android Phone

Not sure where to start? Find your fix here

Pick the symptom that sounds most like yours and jump straight to the right section — no need to read everything.

What’s happening?	Most likely culprit	Go here
Phone’s been getting slower and slower over months	Storage nearly full	Tip 3
Slow even though storage looks fine	Background apps / bloatware	Tip 4 → Tip 5
Everything feels laggy and sluggish to respond	Animation scales too high	Tip 6
Slowed down right after an update	Bad app or OS update	Tip 7
Home screen scrolling is janky	Heavy launcher or too many widgets	Tip 8
Tried everything, phone is 3+ years old	Hardware showing its age	Tip 9 + Bonus section
Randomly slow sometimes, fine other times	RAM pressure / background processes	Tip 2 → Tip 4

Why does your Android phone slow down over time?

Good question! It’s not just age — and it’s usually not a hardware problem either. Here are the four things that cause the vast majority of Android slowdowns, and most phones end up dealing with at least two of them at once.

Storage filling up. This is the big one. When your phone’s internal storage drops below about 10–15% free space, Android runs out of room to write temporary files efficiently. It starts using your flash storage as a stand-in for RAM — a process called paging — and flash storage is way, way slower than real RAM. The phone bogs down noticeably. On a 64 GB phone, that danger zone starts at around 6–9 GB free. On a 32 GB phone, just 3–4 GB free is enough to cause problems.

Too many apps running in the background. Every app you’ve installed that runs a background service — think social media, email, news, maps — uses a small but constant slice of your RAM and CPU. Multiply that across 40 apps and you’ve got a serious cumulative drag.

Bloatware doing its thing. Pre-installed apps from your phone manufacturer or mobile carrier (the stuff you never asked for and can’t seem to remove) run background services around the clock. On budget phones with just 2–3 GB of RAM, bloatware can eat up a huge chunk of available memory before you’ve even opened a single app yourself.

Hardware getting older. Flash storage does degrade over time with repeated read/write cycles, and the chip in a 4-year-old mid-range phone wasn’t designed to run today’s apps. Some slowdown is inevitable on older hardware — but the tips below can claw back a lot of lost speed before you reach that true hardware ceiling.

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Tip 1 — Start here: the quickest wins

Seriously, do these first before anything else. They take less than two minutes total and you’d be surprised how often they completely fix the problem on their own.

Give your phone a proper restart

Not just locking the screen — an actual full restart. This clears every background process that’s been building up, flushes the RAM, resets network connections, and makes every app load fresh when you next open it. If you haven’t restarted in the past few days, do it right now and test your phone’s speed before reading any further. A huge percentage of “my phone is slow” complaints simply vanish after a restart.

Hold the power button → tap Restart. Wait for it to fully boot before you judge the speed.

Clear out your recent apps

Tap the recents button (the square, or swipe up and hold depending on your phone). Swipe everything away, or hit Close all if you’ve got that button. This hands Android a clean slate. Sure, Android is pretty smart about killing background apps on its own — but if you’ve got 30 apps sitting in recents from the past week, clearing them all at once is a quick win for your RAM.

Turn off anything you’re not using right now

Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, and mobile data all run background scanning processes even when you’re not actively using them. At home with solid Wi-Fi? Turn off mobile data. Not using Bluetooth headphones? Toggle it off. Pull down the notification shade and switch off whatever you don’t need at this moment. Each one is tiny on its own, but together they add up.

Kill Always-On Display and live wallpapers

Always-On Display keeps part of your screen active and refreshing content constantly. Live wallpapers re-draw themselves every time you touch the home screen. Both of these are quietly eating GPU resources that could be going to the things you’re actually trying to do. Head to Settings → Display and switch off Always-On Display. Swap any animated wallpaper for a plain static one.

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Tip 2 — The battery saver speed trick (yes, really)

Here’s one most people don’t know about — and it works better than you’d expect.

Battery saver mode was designed to save your battery by cutting down on background activity. But here’s the thing: the background activity it kills is exactly the same stuff that’s slowing your phone down — app syncing in the background, constant location polling, visual effects, push notification refreshes. Turn it on and your phone suddenly has a lot more headroom for the stuff you’re actually doing in the foreground.

Go to Settings → Battery → Battery Saver (the exact path depends on your phone — Samsung calls it Power saving mode, Xiaomi calls it Battery saver). Toggle it on and use your phone for half an hour. You’ll feel the difference.

The catch: some apps won’t sync in the background, and you might get message notifications a little later than usual. For most people that’s totally fine as a temporary boost when the phone is feeling particularly sluggish. Just switch it off again when you want everything back to normal.

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Tip 3 — Free up storage space (this is the big one)

Step 1 — See what’s actually eating your storage

Go to Settings → Storage — you’ll get a breakdown by category: Apps, Photos & videos, Audio, Downloads, Other files. Tap into the biggest ones. Most people are genuinely surprised to discover it’s not their apps at all — it’s Downloads and Photos doing the damage.

Step 2 — Raid your Downloads folder

Open the Files app (or Files by Google if you’ve got it — it’s free on the Play Store and really good). Go to Downloads and sort by size. Delete anything you don’t need — old PDFs, APK files from apps you installed ages ago, ZIP files you downloaded once and completely forgot about. It’s genuinely common to find several gigabytes of forgotten junk in here.

Step 3 — Sort out your photos and videos

Photos and videos are almost always the biggest storage hogs on any phone. The best move is to back them up to the cloud and then delete the local copies so they live in the cloud instead of on your device.

1. Install Google Photos (free) and turn on Back up & sync in Settings. Give it time to complete the backup — could take a while if you’re on a slow connection
2. Once it shows “Backup complete” (you’ll see a tick next to your photos), open Google Photos → Library → tap your profile photo → Free up space on this device
3. Google Photos works out exactly how much space it can safely recover and walks you through deleting the local copies, keeping everything safe in the cloud

Not keen on Google Photos? No problem — OneDrive (free with Microsoft 365), Amazon Photos (free unlimited photo backup with Prime), or even just copying everything to a PC or external drive and deleting it off the phone all work just as well.

Step 4 — Weed out duplicate photos

Google Photos has a handy built-in tool to find and delete duplicates and near-duplicates — like the ten almost-identical shots from a burst you took. Open Google Photos → Library → Utilities → Manage storage. You might find hundreds of megabytes of redundant shots you don’t even remember taking.

Step 5 — Use Files by Google to hunt down hidden storage hogs

Files by Google (free on the Play Store) has a “Clean” tab that’s really clever — it spots large files, old downloads, unused apps, and offline content saved by your streaming apps. It’s way more thorough than browsing through folders manually. Open it, tap Clean, and work through whatever it flags.

Pay special attention to offline downloads from Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, and podcast apps. These are often several gigabytes and are ridiculously easy to forget about.

Step 6 — Uninstall apps you haven’t touched in ages

Go to Settings → Apps. Tap the three dots and sort by Last used. Anything you haven’t opened in 30 days is fair game for deletion. Don’t just look at install size — check the data each app has built up too. Some apps are tiny to install but accumulate gigabytes of data over time. Tap any app → Storage to see the full picture.

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Tip 4 — Clear app caches and rein in background processes

What is app cache and should you be worried about clearing it?

Every app builds up a cache — basically a stash of temporary files meant to help it load faster. Browser images, video thumbnails, map data, recent search results — all of that gets cached. Over time it grows, can get corrupted, and starts slowing the app down rather than speeding it up.

The good news: clearing cache is 100% safe. The app just rebuilds it next time you use it. You won’t lose any of your personal data, saved passwords, login sessions, or settings. (Just don’t confuse it with clearing app data — that’s different and does wipe your settings and logins. Stick to Clear cache only.)

Which apps are the worst offenders?

The usual suspects are: Chrome or your default browser, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Google Maps, Spotify, and Samsung Internet. These guys regularly rack up caches of 500 MB to a few gigabytes. Worth hitting them first.

How to clear an app’s cache

1. Go to Settings → Apps (called Application Manager on older Samsung phones)
2. Tap the app you want to clear
3. Tap Storage (or Storage & cache)
4. Tap Clear cache — again, not Clear storage!
5. Repeat for the other heavy hitters

Stop apps running in the background when you don’t need them to

A lot of apps run background services 24/7 even when you haven’t opened them in weeks — quietly syncing data, polling for notifications, refreshing feeds. You can put a stop to this without having to uninstall anything.

1. Settings → Apps → tap the app
2. Tap Battery
3. Choose Restricted (Android 12+) or toggle off Allow background activity

Social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X are perfect candidates for this. News apps, shopping apps, and deal finders too. None of these need to be doing anything in the background — they can fetch fresh content when you actually open them.

Android 12+ has automatic hibernation built in

If your phone runs Android 12 or newer, there’s a feature called app hibernation that automatically strips unused apps of their permissions and stops their background activity after a few months of non-use. You don’t need to turn it on — it’s already running. You can see which apps have been hibernated at Settings → Apps → Unused apps. If an app you actually use has ended up in there, tap it and check the settings to make sure it won’t get restricted again.

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Tip 5 — Disable the bloatware you never asked for

Bloatware is all those apps your phone came pre-installed with that you never wanted and never use — manufacturer apps, carrier apps, games stores, assistant apps, duplicate browsers. The really frustrating thing is that many of them run background services all the time, even though you’ve never opened them once.

Here’s the thing a lot of people don’t know: even if you can’t uninstall a system app, you can usually disable it. And a disabled app is completely frozen. It can’t run in the background, use any RAM, send notifications, or touch your battery. It’s basically as if it doesn’t exist anymore.

How to disable pre-installed apps

1. Go to Settings → Apps
2. Tap the three-dot menu or filter icon and choose Show system apps
3. Scroll through the list and tap anything you want to get rid of
4. Tap Disable — or if it says Uninstall, even better, go for that instead
5. Confirm. The app is now frozen and won’t run again until you re-enable it

Safe apps to disable — by phone brand

Samsung (One UI):

• Samsung Daily / Bixby Home (the panel on the left of your home screen)
• Bixby Voice (if you use Google Assistant instead)
• Samsung Free (news and games feed)
• Facebook (if it came pre-installed — try to fully uninstall this one rather than just disabling)
• Samsung Pay Mini (if you use Google Pay)
• Game Launcher (if you don’t use Samsung’s gaming features)

Xiaomi / MIUI:

• Mi Video / Mi Music (if you use Spotify, YouTube Music, etc.)
• GetApps (Xiaomi’s own app store — safe to disable if you only use Google Play)
• Mi Browser (if you use Chrome)
• Themes (if you don’t use MIUI themes)
• Feedback (a telemetry / data collection app)

Stock Android / Pixel:

• Google One (if you’re not a subscriber)
• Android Auto (if you never use it)
• Google TV / Movies & TV

Want to go even deeper? There’s an ADB option

Some system apps don’t even give you a Disable button — they’re completely locked. These can often be removed using a tool called Android Debug Bridge (ADB), which lets your PC send commands directly to your phone over USB. It’s a bit more involved, but it’s perfectly safe when done with the right tools.

If you want to try this route, the Universal Android Debloater on GitHub is a good starting point — it has a simple interface and safe pre-built removal lists for most major brands.

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Tip 6 — The Developer Options trick that makes any phone feel faster

Okay, this is our favourite tip on the whole list — and the one most mainstream guides completely ignore. It doesn’t require any technical knowledge, takes about five minutes, and the difference is immediately noticeable. Here’s how it works.

By default, Android runs all its UI animations at 1x speed. Every time you open an app, switch between screens, or navigate anywhere, you’re watching a full-length animation play out. Drop those animation scales to 0.5x and every single one of those interactions feels twice as instant. Your phone hasn’t got any faster — Android is just spending half the time on pretty transitions and twice the time actually doing what you asked.

Step 1 — Unlock Developer Options (takes 30 seconds)

1. Go to Settings → About phone
2. Find Build number (on Samsung it’s under Software information → Build number; on Xiaomi it’s right there in About phone)
3. Tap Build number seven times quickly
4. It’ll ask for your PIN or fingerprint
5. After the seventh tap you’ll get a little message: “You are now a developer!” — which is a fun moment

Developer Options now shows up in your Settings — either directly in the main list or under Settings → System → Developer options, depending on your phone brand.

Step 2 — Turn down the three animation scales

1. Open Developer Options
2. Scroll down to the Drawing section
3. Find Window animation scale — change it from 1x to 0.5x
4. Find Transition animation scale — change to 0.5x
5. Find Animator duration scale — change to 0.5x

Go back to your home screen and open a few apps. The difference is immediate — apps open faster, switching between them is snappier, everything just feels more responsive. All without touching the actual hardware.

Step 3 — Turn on Force GPU rendering (optional)

While you’re in Developer Options, find Force GPU rendering (under Hardware accelerated rendering) and switch it on. This makes Android use the GPU instead of the CPU for 2D drawing, which can noticeably improve UI smoothness on older phones where the CPU is the weak point. On newer phones it makes less of a difference, but on budget devices it’s worth turning on.

Step 4 — Limit background processes (only if needed)

Find Background process limit in Developer Options. Normally this is set to Standard limit and Android manages it automatically. If you’ve got 3 GB of RAM or less and your phone is really struggling, you can try setting it to At most 3 processes. The trade-off is that apps take a bit longer to resume when you switch back to them, since Android has to reload them from scratch more often.

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Tip 7 — Keep things updated (or roll back if an update broke something)

Staying updated is genuinely good for performance

Android OS updates regularly include memory management improvements and performance fixes — not just new features and security patches. Google Play Services updates (which happen quietly in the background) also affect how well every app on your phone runs. It’s worth keeping both current.

Check for Android system updates: Settings → System → System update (Samsung and Xiaomi call it Software update).

Update your apps: Open the Google Play Store → tap your profile photo → Manage apps & device → Updates available. Hit Update all and let it run. If you want more control, go app by app so you can spot if any particular update causes problems.

What if an update is what made things worse?

It does happen — occasionally an app update is just poorly optimised and makes things noticeably slower. If your phone started dragging shortly after an update, it’s worth investigating that specific app.

How to roll back a single app:

1. Open the Google Play Store
2. Find the app and open its store page
3. Tap the three-dot menu in the top right
4. If you see Uninstall updates, tap it to roll back to the previous version
5. Then disable auto-updates for that specific app until a fixed version comes out

Rolling back a system app works the same way: Settings → Apps → show system apps → find the app → three-dot menu → Uninstall updates. This is most useful for Google Play Services, Chrome, or Google Maps if one of those went wrong.

What happens when your phone stops getting updates?

Most Android phones get OS updates for 2–3 years (Samsung flagships are the exception at 4–5 years). When updates stop, the phone keeps working, but it won’t benefit from newer Android’s performance improvements. If you’re in that situation and performance is really suffering, the options are custom ROM installation (advanced — beyond the scope of this article) or, honestly, upgrading. We cover that decision in the bonus section at the end.

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Tip 8 — Swap your launcher for a lighter one

Your launcher is the app that runs your home screen, app drawer, and all the transitions between them. Manufacturer launchers — Samsung One UI Home, MIUI Launcher, ColorOS — are packed with features and animations designed to show off the phone at its best. The problem is they weren’t built for speed, especially on older or budget hardware.

A lightweight third-party launcher strips all of that back and replaces it with something lean and highly optimised. On phones with 3 GB of RAM or less, swapping the launcher can genuinely transform how the phone feels day-to-day.

First — strip the widgets off your home screen

Before you swap launchers, long-press each widget on your home screen and remove them. Weather widgets, news feeds, calendar widgets, clocks — these all poll for live data in the background and redraw themselves constantly. Each one you remove is background CPU load you’re eliminating. Fewer widgets = snappier home screen, whatever launcher you’re using.

The best lightweight launchers right now

Launcher	Price	Best for
Nova Launcher	Free (Prime £4.49 one-off)	Best all-rounder — fast, customisable, very popular
Lawnchair 2	Free, open-source	Pixel-style experience on any Android, completely free
Microsoft Launcher	Free	Windows users who want their phone and PC to talk to each other
Simple App Launcher	Free, open-source	Very old or very low-spec phones — absolute bare minimum resource usage

How to set your new launcher as the default

1. Download your chosen launcher from the Google Play Store
2. Press the Home button — Android will ask which app to use as your home screen
3. Pick your new launcher and tap Always
4. If nothing pops up: Settings → Apps → Default apps → Home app → choose your new launcher

Don’t worry — all your installed apps, photos, data, and settings are completely untouched. The launcher only controls the home screen, app drawer, and transitions. Think of it as redecorating rather than moving house.

Samsung users: kill Bixby Home while you’re at it

Samsung phones have that panel on the far left of the home screen — the one showing a live news feed and Bixby suggestions. It’s constantly pulling in content in the background. To turn it off: pinch on the home screen to go into edit mode → swipe to the leftmost panel → toggle it off. That’s it. No need to uninstall anything — just disable the panel itself.

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Tip 9 — Factory reset: the last resort (but it works)

A factory reset wipes everything — all your apps, photos, messages, accounts, and settings — and takes your phone back to the exact state it was in when it left the box. Every performance issue caused by software gets nuked. Every cache cleared. Every bloatware service back to its default disableable state.

It’s the most powerful software fix there is. But it’s also the most disruptive. Only go here after you’ve genuinely tried everything else in this guide.

Backup checklist — don’t skip this part

This takes about 20–30 minutes and could save you from losing things you can’t get back. Please don’t skip it.

What to back up	How to do it
Photos & videos	Google Photos with backup & sync on — wait until it says “Backup complete”
Contacts	Settings → Google → Backup — make sure contacts are synced to your Google account
WhatsApp messages	WhatsApp → Settings → Chats → Chat Backup → Back up now (saves to Google Drive)
Two-factor authentication (2FA)	Export your codes from Google Authenticator / Authy / 2FAS first — this is critical, don’t forget it
Game progress and app data	Settings → Google → Backup → turn on and tap Back up now
Text messages (SMS)	Install SMS Backup & Restore (free) if you want to keep your message history
Browser bookmarks	Sign into Chrome with your Google account — they sync automatically

How to do the factory reset

1. Make sure the battery is above 50% or plug the phone in
2. Samsung: Settings → General management → Reset → Factory data reset
3. Stock Android: Settings → System → Reset options → Erase all data (factory reset)
4. Xiaomi: Settings → About phone → Factory reset
5. Read through what will be wiped, tap Reset, and enter your PIN
6. The phone reboots, wipes everything, and comes back up on the setup screen after 5–10 minutes

One golden rule for setting it back up

After the reset, resist the urge to restore everything from a backup straight away. Doing a full backup restore re-installs all your old apps and their cached data — essentially putting your phone straight back into the state it was in before. You’d be back to square one.

Instead: set up your Google account fresh, reinstall only the apps you actually use (not everything you had before), and let Google Photos bring your photos back quietly in the background. Think of the reset as a chance to be selective about what goes back on the phone.

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Bonus — When it really is the hardware (and what to do about it)

If you’ve genuinely worked through every tip above — freed up storage, killed the bloatware, turned down the animations, cleared caches, swapped the launcher, and even done a factory reset — and your phone is still noticeably slow, you’ve hit the hardware ceiling. That’s not a failure of the tips, it’s just the reality of older mobile hardware.

Signs the hardware itself is the bottleneck

• Phone gets warm during basic stuff like browsing or messaging
• Apps crash or randomly close when you switch between them (RAM running out)
• Camera takes 5+ seconds to open or to process a photo after you take it
• Web pages in Chrome reload from scratch every time you switch back to the browser tab
• Phone has 2 GB of RAM or less — modern Android uses 1.5–2 GB just sitting at the home screen

Why older phones feel slow even after a factory reset

Budget and older mid-range phones from roughly 2018–2021 used eMMC 5.1 flash storage. Current budget phones use UFS 2.2, which is about 3–4 times faster for loading apps. No software tweak in the world bridges that gap. A brand new £130 phone with UFS storage will load apps faster than a 2019 flagship running on degraded eMMC. That’s just the reality of how storage technology has moved on.

Don’t overlook the battery — it affects speed too

Android phones, just like iPhones, throttle CPU performance when the battery can no longer deliver the peak current needed for full-speed operation. It’s the same issue that got Apple into trouble a few years back, and it affects Android equally. If your phone is 3+ years old and the battery has degraded to 70–80% health, replacing the battery can actually restore a meaningful amount of performance — at a fraction of the cost of a new phone.

Most Android battery replacements cost £20–£40 at a repair shop, and many models are DIY-friendly.

Great budget Android phones if it’s time to upgrade

If you’ve decided it’s time for a new phone, you genuinely don’t need to spend much. Today’s budget Android phones run circles around flagships from a few years ago. Some good ones to check out:

• Motorola Moto G series — consistently brilliant value, clean near-stock software, quick updates. Our top pick for most people
• Xiaomi Redmi Note series — great screens and cameras for the price; heavier software with MIUI
• Poco X series — built for performance at budget prices, often with flagship-tier chips
• Samsung Galaxy A series — reliable, familiar if you’re already a Samsung user, decent update support

All of these start around £130–£180 new and will feel dramatically faster than any phone more than 3–4 years old.

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Your questions answered

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Quick recap — what to do based on how much time you’ve got

Not everyone has an afternoon free to work through all nine tips. Here’s the same advice broken down by time available.

Got 2 minutes?

Restart your phone, swipe everything away in the recents menu, and switch off Bluetooth or mobile data if you’re not using them right now. Seriously — this fixes a shocking number of “my phone is slow” problems on its own.

Got 10 minutes?

Do the above, then check your storage at Settings → Storage and get rid of the obvious junk: Downloads folder, local photo copies (after backing up to Google Photos), and any apps you haven’t touched in a month. Then jump into Developer Options and drop all three animation scales to 0.5x. These two changes will make a noticeable lasting difference on almost any Android phone.

Got an hour?

Work through the full guide in order. Thoroughly free up storage, clear the heavy app caches, disable whatever bloatware you can, install a lightweight launcher, and tighten up background app restrictions. If the phone is 3+ years old, seriously consider whether a factory reset is worth the setup time — it genuinely restores out-of-box performance and gives you a clean slate.

Nothing’s worked?

Check the battery health with a free app like AccuBattery. If the battery has degraded significantly and the phone is 3+ years old, a battery replacement might be all it needs. If the hardware really has hit its limit, the budget phones in the bonus section will give you a genuinely huge performance step-up for not much money.