Tips & Tutorials

The Top 3 Causes of Bad Phone Performance

When you get a new mobile phone, you probably love how sleek and smooth it is, how untouched the screen is by your fingerprints, and how quickly it operates. However, it’s unfortunately inevitable that over time, your phone’s performance seems to slow down as you collect more files and your apps bloat. One way to quickly down slim your apps is by using the app manager feature in dfndr security to remove apps you aren’t using. This feature allows you to pick and choose which apps to get rid of and overall, can help towards the speed and performance of your phone.

The following gets to the root of why your phone’s performance may not be up to snuff after you’ve used it for a while. These problems can be frustrating, but they’re not the end-all-be-all of a smoothly running device. Follow the below advice and you should be better equipped for a quick and smooth Android experience.

Read More: Why You Should Care About Your Phone’s RAM

Bloated Apps
After continued use, apps are some of the worst offenders for affecting the performance of our Android devices. This is because of something called “feature creep,” where new features are continuously added to your individual apps via updates. This leads to apps eventually using up more RAM and CPU, as your phone hardware stays the same. That means a slower performance that you may even be able to notice over time. To reduce the lag that bloated apps can cause, you can start by replacing some of them with more “lightweight” apps like Facebook Lite. Since the most frequent offenders are social media apps, note-taking apps, and so on, this is a great place to start.

Background Apps
Even if you don’t realize it, apps may be running in the background of your device when you’re not actively using them, resulting in a slower or poorer performance on your phone. For example, your email app is checking for new messages even if you don’t physically have the app open. Even things like home screen widgets and animated wallpapers are culprits of these crimes. To help minimize this issue, check your device settings for which apps are using the most battery. From there, change the app’s individual settings so that they’re not refreshing in the background.

Operating System Upgrades
When you first bought your phone, it undoubtedly came with a specific operating system that has perhaps been upgraded time and time again since you first purchased the device. While these operating systems are certainly an upgrade, they were designed with the newer model phones in mind. Newer operating systems are likely to perform better with more advanced hardware. Thus, installing newer software on an older phone can result in a poorer performance.

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The dfndr blog is an informative channel that presents exclusive content on security and privacy in the mobile and business world, with tips to keep users protected. Populated by a select group of expert reporters, the channel has a partnership with dfndr lab's security team. Together they bring you, first-notice news about attacks, scams, internet vulnerabilities, malware and everything affecting cybersecurity.

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