15 simple to do tips to speed up your slow iPhone
Recently many of the iPhone users complained about slowing down of their iOS mobiles. Apple admitted to the slowing performance on their older iPhone models and the blame load was on the batteries that wear out with time. Older batteries, cold weather and low charge can shut your phone down without warning, and so the performance of older models has been reduced to prevent this. But besides such recent findings there are several other reasons why your phone’s performance may be slowing down. That may be not enough free space or recent iOS update may have slowed things, or the interface may have stop responding or an app may take longer time to open. Keeping these things in mind here are 15 simple to do tips to speed up your slow iPhone.
1. Always keep iOS up to date
As a first tip check whether your iOS is up to date or not, Apple’s most recent operating system for the iPhone and iPad is iOS 11 at time of writing. Assuming your iPhone supports the latest version, updating should speed things up. But this may also be a bit wary. Though good for new devices, but on older smartphones, it’s possible that updating will actually slow it down, because it struggles to run the more demanding OS. To check whether your iPhone is up to date or not go to Settings> General > Software update.
2. Close all open applications
Second tip is to close down all non-essential apps. For that double-click the Home button to bring up the currently running apps. Swipe upwards to close them. You can swipe to close three apps with up to three fingers to speed up the process a little a bit. Though recent research and comments from Apple itself has suggested this is not always best tip to speed up the device. Find out more in Daring Fireball’s blog post on the subject.
3. Restart your iPhone
Many a times when things become unresponsive on mobile this is best tip to use. Press and hold the Sleep button the one on the top right of the iPhone on iPhone 5s and earlier, or on the right edge on iPhone 6 and later until the Power Off slider appears. Swipe it and wait for the iPhone to power down.
Once done start the iPhone up again by pressing and holding the Sleep button for about few seconds. You’ll see the Apple icon, then the iPhone will restart. You shouldn’t have to do this very often, but when you do it’ll clear out the memory and can often fix unruly apps. The occasional power cycle helps keep iOS ticking over.
4. Delete unwanted apps
In the excitement to play pokies, or otherwise on friend’s recommendation we download many apps on device which after few use we no longer need them. These unwanted apps take up space on your device making things go slow on iPhone. One quick way to free up a chunk of space is to delete a few unwanted apps.
Identify which apps are taking the most space by going to Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Usage and then tapping ‘Manage Storage’ under Storage. You’ll now see a list of apps and how much space they’re taking up on your phone. You can easily delete apps you don’t need here by tapping on the app name, and choosing Delete App on the next screen and should aim to have at least 1GB space left.
You can also delete apps from your Home Screen by pressing and holding the app until it jumps about, and then tapping on the X that appears in the corner.
5. Clean your browser cookies and data
It’s better to clear and clean your browser from time to time. So try emptying Safari’s data, cookies and so on to free up some memory. To do this open the Settings app and scroll down to Safari. Here you can choose ‘Clear History and Website Data’. Note that this may make browsing the web a bit less convenient for a while. Safari will forget the URLs you’ve been visiting so won’t suggest them as you type, unless they’re bookmarked and also clearing data may mean some websites forget your preferences.
6. Get rid of automatic background processes
Getting rid of automated features will help keep your iPhone running faster, and help extend your battery life as well. The following feature was added way back in iOS 7, so if you’ve got that or a later version, you can benefit from it.
Start by turning off Automatic Downloads. Tap Settings > iTunes & App Store > and turn all the Automatic Downloads off. Now turn off Background App Refresh. Tap Settings > General > Background App Refresh and turn Background App Refresh off. You don’t need these processes going on in the background and you’ll see a big boost in battery life as well as a noticeable increase in performance if you stop them.
7. Turn down the graphics
In iOS 7 you will find some fancy new visual effects, but dialling them down can help to improve performance. Start by turning off Motion. Tap on Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion and set Reduce Motion to On. This turns off the parallax effect of icons and alerts. Many people also find the phone easier to use in this setting. Next you can reduce the see-through background effects which can also slow things down on an older iPhone. First tap on Settings > General > Accessibility > Increase Contrast and set Reduce Transparency to On.
8. Try resetting your iPhone
Resetting your mobile is another tip. Though a full reset takes longer but is a more effective way of solving problems with the way an iPhone is running. Press and hold the Home and Sleep buttons at the same time. Keep holding them while the screen goes black right up until the Apple logo appears. When that appears you can let go.
9. Remove unwanted text messages, photos, music and more
Like unwanted apps there are many text messages, photo or music files that you no longer need so better remove or delete them to have more space for the iPhone to breathe more and work faster.
To remove messages start by opening Messages and scroll down to find any message threads that you can manage without. Swipe to the right and tap Delete. It’s worth noting that deleting threads with only text-based messages won’t free up much space on your device, so it’s worth concentrating on threads that include a lot of images, videos and, voice notes.
There’s also a relatively easy way to stop the back-log of videos and photos building up in the Messages app. If there is a person who sends you a lot of images, but you don’t want to delete a whole conversation with that person, you can quickly delete a few chosen images by opening up their message, tapping on the i icon and then pressing on an image until you see the option to Copy, Delete, or do more. Choose More, and then tap on all the images you want to remove from your device.
If you are sent a lot of audio messages you can change your settings so that they don’t stick around after you have listened to them, freeing up lots of space in one go. So simply open the Settings app, navigate to the Messages menu, scroll to the bottom and change the expiry of audio messages from ‘Never’ to ‘After 2 minutes’.
With this setting, any voice messages you receive on the device will automatically delete themselves after two minutes of being opened, which will keep your storage free.
To get more free space open the Settings app, then tap General, and Usage, like you did when uninstalling apps. You’ll see how much storage space is left and which apps are using up most of the space.
Note that Music and Photos & Camera, are such aps that use more space having music, images, and videos files.
To delete music files open the Music app and find the non-vital track, album or artist that you want to delete. Swipe to the right and press Delete.
To copy photos to Apple PC and remove them from your iPhone at the same time, plug the iPhone into the Apple Mac computer and open Image Capture. Now tick the option ‘Delete after import’ at the bottom left.
Click the photo you want to copy across, or select multiple consecutive photos using the Shift key, and drag and drop them into a folder on the Mac. You’ll see a green tick appear next to them in Image Capture, to show that they’ve been downloaded.
If there are any photos on there that you don’t want to keep but still want deleted from the iPhone, select them and click the red circle at the bottom. Image Capture will confirm you want to delete the photo.
You can also delete photos on the phone itself. Open the Photos app, find the images you want to delete, tap ‘Select’ and then tap on the images you want to delete. Then tap the bin icon and confirm to delete the photos and videos you’ve selected.
You will then need to go to the Recently Deleted folder to actually delete the images though as Apple keeps them on your device for 30 days just in case you change your mind.
10. Restore from backup
The next stage is to restore it from a backup. If you’ve backed up recently, you can simply restore from that. Plug the iPhone into the Mac and open iTunes. Click the iPhone Under Backups, click ‘Restore Backup.’ Note that since you’re using an old backup it’s going to undo all of the changes you just made to your device, so you may have to go through some of the steps all over again which may include deleting things all over again.
11. Have big heart to restore iPhone to factory settings
It takes courage to follow this tip. As most of your data is lost in this process if you haven’t kept a back up. So for factory reset go to Settings > General > Reset and then select Erase All Content and Settings. After typing in your passcode if you’ve set one, you’ll get a warning box appear, with the option to Erase iPhone (or iPad) in red. Now Tap this. You’ll need to enter your Apple ID password to confirm the action, then the iPad or iPhone will wipe everything off its storage and go back to the initial setup screen you saw when you first used the device.
You can also fully reset your iPhone or iPad through iTunes. When you plug in your iOS device, you should be able to see a ‘Restore iPhone’ button, which will fully reset the device. Remember to back up your iPhone data before following this tip either back up to iTunes by connecting the phone to a computer as above; or to iCloud, by opening the Settings app, then scrolling down to iCloud, then Storage & Backup, then Back Up Now in iOS 6 or turn on iCloud Backup in iOS 7 or later.
12. Have patience to get the next iOS update to download
As a general rule of thumb with Apple devices, every major iOS update requires more and more power – it’s why every new iPhone has a faster processor than its predecessor. Apple tries to combat the issue of sluggish performance by only allowing devices that have sufficient power to run the new software. However even with this rule in place, some users who have the least powerful of the ‘upgrade-capable’ iDevices find that they slow down, sometimes quite dramatically. More recently Apple has been making a conscious effort to improve stability and battery life in its iOS updates, which should also mean a boost in speed – especially with iOS 11
13. Check your warranty, and fix an appointment with Apple
If none of the above tips work, it’s time to decide whether the speed of your iPhone is a serious enough problem for you to take it up with Apple. If there’s a problem with a component, the issue may be covered by your Apple warranty if you have one. As mentioned above, slowness can be a matter of perception, but if you’re sure something’s up, and you’ve tried all the above, you may wish to ask Apple if they can check for a hardware issue.
14. Time to replace the iPhone’s battery
Since iOS 10.2.1 Apple has been slowing down older iPhones that have ageing batteries in order to elongate their lifespan. But you get longer use of your iPhone at the expense of performance. Apple has now admitted that it slows down older phones, and has made replacing these older batteries much more affordable. It’s even cheaper if you buy a new battery from eBay, but it’s a not a safe procedure according to Apple regarding these non-official batteries.
15. Finally get a new iPhone
Finally if nothing works and even Apple fails to help you out in speeding your device its time to discard your old iPhone and but a new one. There are many new models and you can select according to your budget and requirement. Be it latest iPhone X or iPhone 8 you can compare the prices online and get a new iPhone.