5 Reasons Your Phone Slows Down Over Time (Topic)

If you are not one of those people who change phones every year, as soon as a new model of your favorite manufacturer comes out. You can definitely feel how your phone starts to lose performance in front of your eyes and works slower and slower. This problem is relevant for both iPhone and Android smartphones.

Let's try to figure out exactly what causes this drop in performance and find out how you can help your phone perform better and faster.

On my own, I note that this article is most relevant specifically for owners of old smartphones. For those experiencing short-term problems from a specific application or memory leaks, a simple device reboot may help.

1. Update your phone OS

Your phone at the time of purchase most likely had a pre-installed operating system, for example Android 5 or iOS 9, both of these operating systems were developed for a specific set of technical characteristics of your phone and over time after each update, your phone will descend from the recommended system requirements to minimal (like with PC games)

Simply put, each new update requires more and more hardware capabilities of your phone (more memory, more powerful processor) and your phone at some point stops coping with all the new capabilities of your OS.

What to do? Apply only minor updates and security updates. Try to postpone the transition to a completely new version of the OS as long as possible, for example, from iOS 10 to iOS 11 or Android 5 to Android 6.

2. Updating Applications

All of us have noticed more than once how we added a bunch of useless and frankly unnecessary and braking functions to our favorite program in the new update. You don't have to go far for an example. The same Skype or Utorrent have acquired a bunch of useless functions and become terribly slow and inconvenient.

But these are still flowers compared to the orgy that many mobile developers create. Often your favorite application with simple and convenient functionality turns into a multi-gigabyte Frankenstein.

Such developers tend to be very reluctant to look at the moderate resources of old phone models or ignore them altogether, which affects the incredible gluttony of many applications in terms of your phone's resources.

What to do? It is worth turning off auto-update in your app store and manually downloading updates only for what you need.

If you see that the application lags shamelessly after the update, you can uninstall it and download the old version.

It should be borne in mind that many developers make it impossible to use an older version of the application, for example, many games and applications that require a constant connection to the server.

3. Background processes

Everything is simple here. Each application running in the background uses processor, memory and battery power. The more they are running, the faster your phone is discharged and the less free memory it has and the more it lags and slows down.

What can you do about it? Go to the statistics of the phone's battery usage, as a rule, the biggest battery eaters also manage to eat up a lot of memory and processor time in addition.

Prevent these applications from running in the background unless it is necessary for them to work.

Remove unused applications that hang in the background.

Use fewer widgets and switch to a static desktop wallpaper.

4. Memory degradation

Let's go a little deeper into the technological part. All smartphones, be they iPhone or Samsung, use flash memory as a storage medium.

This technology has a number of pronounced advantages, such as low cost, mechanical strength, large volume, speed of operation and low power consumption. There are also a number of disadvantages that affect its degradation, that is, the deterioration of all parameters over time. It has limited lifespan and electrostatic sensitivity.

The most common type of flash memory in smartphones is called NAND. In order not to delve into the theory, we will just tell you the features of this type of memory.

For maximum performance, it needs free space, that is, the more space is occupied on your smartphone, the slower it works (naturally, this does not happen from 10% of the occupied space, but from about 70% - 80% of the occupied disk space, you will start feel a loss in memory speed)

Memory degrades with use, as it has a limited limit on cell rewriting cycles. To put it simply, it itself deteriorates over time when using the device.

I would like to note that Samsung is the leader in degradation rate, since they use the cheapest and, as a consequence, the most short-lived type of NAND TLC memory (4,000 rewriting cycles per cell for TLC versus 10,000 MLC) instead of a little more expensive, more feet durable MLC.

What to do? Here you can recommend not filling your device to capacity, leaving at least 40% of free memory on your device

5. Re-evaluating your phone's capabilities

Perhaps you are simply overestimating the capabilities of your phone and think that things should happen faster based on the speed of other devices.

This is especially true for owners of weaker phones.

Many people evaluate their phone based on how the neighbor's phone works, not always paying attention to the fact that the neighbor has the latest model, and you do not.

What to do? Here you can either put up with it, or buy a new device, there are no other options.

The Topic of Article: 5 Reasons Your Phone Slows Down Over Time.
Author: Jake Pinkman