Android Tips: 10 Easy Ways to Speed up and Boost Performance of Android Smartphones or Tablets

If you are one of such people who likes to experiment with and install hundreds of apps in his Android device, you will find this post very useful. As time goes by, your internal storage and system memory becomes full with numerous apps running in the background. Now your apps will open slower than before and you will experience lag even when you press the phone icon to bring up the dialer.  It gets really annoying when you decide to take the picture of a rare bird that has just landed in your backyard and you end up losing the shot waiting for the camera app to start on your  “smartphone”.  Later, even waking up and unlocking your android device starts to take time. Now, you realize it’s time to take action.  You also learn that a slow memory will not only affect the speed of your android device but also decrease your battery life.

This post will try to address some of the following common concerns of Android users:

• My android runs really slow. What can I do?
• My android  is lagging.
• My android freezes a lot.
• My android  hangs and I have to force close apps.
• My android phone becomes slow and then apps start misbehaving or crashing.
• My apps are running slow and battery is draining fast in my android.
• How do I make my android phone faster?

Well, here are 10 easy tips you can use to speed up and boost performance of android smartphones or tablets:

1. Uninstall all apps and games that “you think you will use later”

I had loads of apps installed in my android system. On my quest to speed up my android phone, I decided to uninstall apps that I don’t use on a daily basis. I found that I rarely used almost half of the apps and games on my Android. Uninstalling those apps gave me lots of free storage as well as improved apps loading time.

2. Always check for and update your firmware or OS to the latest available version

Some people find the Android OS update files just too large to install and they say that they are happy with their “current” version of Android OS such as Froyo or Gingerbread. It is very important that you don’t skip on those OTA system updates. Each new version of OS brings better features and bug fixes for your Android device. Apart from that, newer Jellybean versions of Android OS has better memory management and runs very smooth. If you don’t know how to checck for updates, you can simply

3. Sign out from apps that run in the background

There is no use of signing into apps that you are not using at the moment. Simply open your apps and sign out and those apps will not run in the background. For example, I only sign into Facebook, Google +, Wechat and such apps when I’m connected to Wi-Fi and after viewing my updates I log out of all those apps.

4. Disable auto-updates in Google Play Store

If you have more than twenty apps and auto updates enabled in Google Play Store, your apps are always searching for and installing updates in the background and this will greatly hog down your system memory or RAM.  Hence, you should disable auto updates in Google play but keep update notifications on so that you will know when updates are available.  For this,

• Open Google Play Store >> Go to Settings >> Auto- update apps>> Check “Do not auto-update apps”
• Again from the same Settings>>disable “Auto-add widgets and enable “Notifications”

5. Turn off Sync

Android come with sync feature which will sync many of your app datas to your Google account. These synced information includes things like Facebook , Twitter, Vine,  LInkedln, Skype and Gmail contacts, Google calendar, browser data, app data and Google + backups.

It is recommended that you turn off sync to save memory and boost speed of your Android device. Sync is a very useful feature but you should only use it when you need it rather that leaving it to run in the background at all times.  Manually go to settings>>Accounts to sync only when you have new contacts or data to sync to Google servers.

6. Keep your apps up to date

You should  always keep your apps up to date because developers are coming up with newer versions of app that use less memory at the same time run faster.  For example- compare the first versions of Facebook app with the latest one you will notice significant decrease in memory usage and increase in content load time.

7. Setup task kills on every screen unlock and put a task killer widget on the home screen

There are apps that allow you to kill background tasks each time you perform a screen unlock. One such app is Battery Doctor which is highly recommended. After installing battery doctor

• Click on the “Smart Saving” icon on the top right of screen .(the icon appears only when “Save” tab is selected at the bottom of the screen) .
• Turn on “Screen off Task Kill”.  Now whenever you unlock your screen your background tasks will be killed.

You can also use the battery doctor’s task killer widget to kill all tasks in the background with a single tap.

8. Move apps to SD

Low internal storage also slows down your android device. It is recommended that you keep at least 400MB of available system space. If you have less than 250 MB free system storage you won’t be able to install any more apps. To check how much free space you have, Go to settings>> Storage>> Internal Storage >> Available.   System Storage is usually limited to less than 2 GB while you may have total internal storage of 16GB, 32GB or more.

To free up the limited system space, you can move your apps to SD using apps like Link2SD, App2SD or Cleanmaster. After installing Apps2SD simply select and move apps from system storage to SD. When your system have more free space,  it will increase overall performance. Here are some more ways to free android internal storage.

9. Clean junk files (Cache, residual files)

Many apps store cache files which in time will eat up a lot of space. It is recommended you delete those files from time to time. You can choose to remove cache files of all or few selective apps. Sometimes after uninstall you will have some residual files remaining in your system and it is good to delete those files too. Cleanmaster is a highly recommended app that will easily find and clean junk files from your android storage.

10. Use less eye candy on your Android Screen

Sometimes to revamp our android screen, we install numerous widgets and live wallpapers.  These homescreen blings make our screen a bit more attractive albeit at the cost of high memory or RAM usage. It is recommended that you use as little widgets as possible and also stick to normal wallpapers, you will find plenty of cool wallpapers that will make you forget those glittery live wallpapers. I recommend installing the Backgrounds and Wallpaper HD app to download awesome HQ wallpapers.

Note: These are very easy and useful tips that will definitely save you a lot of bad android experiences and boost performance of your android smartphone or tablets.  If you have rooted your android, then there are additional measures that can be taken such as using the SDcard on your Android as RAM to boost your system speed. You can also give that a try.