1. Know your Device
It is important that you learn about the capabilities and drawbacks
of your phone. Don’t overburden your phone with resource-hungry apps
which would otherwise degrade your phone’s performance at your expense.
2. Update your Android
If you haven’t
updated your Android phone to the latest firmware,
you should. Google brings great improvements to each new release of the
Android operating system, including updates that ensure stability,
higher performance speed and connectivity along with other user-friendly
new features.
Tablets can also run on ICS and Jelly Bean now; you should be able to update it until Android 4.1 Jelly Bean via
System updates (Check under ‘About phone’).
3. Remove Unwanted Apps
Every app you install in your phone
take some storage space and
runs some background processes. The more storage space occupied or the more background processes running on your phone, the slower your phone’s performance.
Don’t install apps you hardly use. Keep only the apps that you need and if you have got an app that isn’t really useful,
you can uninstall or disable it.
4. Disable Unnecessary Apps
‘Performance assistant’ was introduced in Android ICS to help you
disable apps that you don’t need.
Disabling apps is different from uninstalling apps – uninstallation
remove application files from the phone but no file is removed/deleted
when you disable it. These disabled apps are
not shown on the home screen or app tray but you can
re-enable them for use whenever you need them.
5. Update Apps
You should regularly update your phone’s installed apps from Google
Play. Try to get updates your apps when they are available in Google
Play. Developers fix bugs and add features in new released versions of
apps.
Updated apps perform better and faster, and will less likely crash your phone.
6. Use High-Speed Memory Card
The memory card is the storage space of your phone.
Phones with low internal memory can get a boost from high-capacity memory cards for maximum storage space.
But it adds not only capacity but also speed to the mix. You can get
between 2GB to 32GB worth of storage space to support high speed
read/write operations. Always go for memory cards of Class 6 or Class 10
for your Android phone if you seek performance for your phone.
7. Keep Fewer Widgets
Widgets are not apps, which only run once you choose to activate them. No,
widgets are always running in the background;
they are active all the time. While some Android users use it to keep
track of the weather, and their important dates, others use widgets like
‘Extended controls’ for quick access for essential configurations such
as switching Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or their GPS on or off.
They do have their uses but bear in mind that
having too many of them running on your homescreen
will cause your device’s performance to slow down.
8. Avoid Live Wallpapers
You must be loving Android’s live wallpaper feature. Phones (from
different manufacturers) come with different live wallpapers but you
should know that live wallpapers that are badly made will need more CPU
cycles to run, thus
draining the battery faster. Everytime you activate the home screen, you run not only your apps but also your live wallpaper.
9. Stop Syncing
Sync is a very good feature which synchronizes your data with Google
servers. Keeping sync on, you can get notifications whenever new mail
comes in or when you get new notifications or updates for apps. To do
this,
it does a refresh at every preset interval (e.g.
it checks your mail every 5 minutes for new incoming mail), and this
will eat into your android’s performance for other activities.
You can
keep Sync off for unrequired services or only have it on when you need to transfer or upload materials to Google servers.
10. Turn off Animations
What animations? Well, if you haven’t noticed, your phone screen
actually fades out and in as you switch from one task to the other. To
see this in action Go to
Settings > Developer Options > Window Animation Scale > Animation scale 10x. Then choose
Window Animation Scale again to see the fade in effect in ‘slow-mo’.
When you choose
Animation off, the screen just snaps to position without animation. You can also turn off
Transition Animation Scale in the same way. If you are a heavy user, you’d probably notice that your Android performs faster with all animations off.
Bonus:
Use Task Killer/Manager
Download any free Task Killer apps or Task Managers from Google Play. Some of the good ones are
Advanced Task Killer and
Super Task Killer Free. Use a task killer to kill background processes and other apps that you don’t need or you don’t use.
Set options to automatically kill unnecessary apps (based on your
selections) after every set period of time. Some of the examples include
Update Manager (updates don’t come every minute/hour) or any
manufacturer-installed app which you don’t require.
Root your Android
As Android is built on the Linux kernel, like any other OS, it also can be rooted. Rooting your Android
gives you administrator level access on your phone, which means that you can uninstall the apps that came with your phone but may not be what you want to use.
You can then
flash it with custom ROMs that may be a better fit to your
job requirements or personality, or to
enhance the performance and battery life of your phone. You can even
update your phone to the latest OS or updates that could otherwise be unsupported for your phone model.
When Not to Root
There are a number of factors against rooting your Android device; for one thing,
most manufacturers deem your phone warranty voided if your phone has been rooted. You also need to know what you are doing to
avoid screwing everything up, beyond repair.
This is called ‘bricking’ a.k.a. turning your phone into a useless
brick. So think it through before you use this method to enhance the
performance of your Android.
Use Lightweight Background Apps
Everyone enjoys listening to music but imagine how much memory the
music player app requires to play a whole album for you. It’s the same
with other types of background apps you may have. Use
lightweight apps for these purposes,
e.g., you can install a music player that requires 1 MB installation
space (and thus less RAM too) than the ones requiring 10 MB or more.
This way, your phone
will have more free memory, boosting your phone’s battery and performance.
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