9 Tips to Make Your iPhone Run Faster
Technology is pretty great, and we all benefit from it. But sometimes, when it fails, it’s super frustrating. Waiting for your phone to load is totally a first-world problem, we know. However, you can’t deny that watching that pinwheel of death spin, or the blue screen of death is a special form of technological torture. Sometimes our smartphones get bogged down by all the crap we store on it, and what it really needs is a good deleting sesh. The folks at Tech Insider have a handy video on how you can improve the speed on your phone. Here are nine steps you can take to make your phone faster.
1. Clear Safari’s cache: Clearing the cache of your Safari browser means you’re erasing your browsing history, cookies and more. Basically, the thousands of pages of info that are clogging up your phone can be removed in a click. Do this by going to Settings > Safari, scrolling to the bottom and tapping on “Clear History and Website Data.” A pop up will come up, and just confirm you want to clear it out.
2. Delete old photos + videos: You do not need alllllll those blurry pics that you took at the Maroon 5 concert in 2008. Erase ’em so your phone has some room to breathe. Just go to your Camera Roll, select the images you’d like to get rid of and tap on the trash icon to remove them.
3. Delete large apps: Is the Kim Kardashian Hollywood Game taking up about five gigs of your memory? If you haven’t touched the thing in months, it might be time to let it go. Do this by going to Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Usage > Manage Storage. That’ll take you to the screen above. Tap on the app you want to delete and click “Delete App.”
4. Erase old texts: All those former Tinder flame text exchanges from three years back? It’s time to permanently erase them. Go to your messages app and tap on “Edit” on the top left. Tick all the convos you want to clear out and click on “Delete.”
5. Close your background apps: While most apps in the background go into a hibernating state, some do continue to run while open. Double click the home button, and swipe those apps up to close them. Swipe two at a time if you want to be efficient!
6. Turn off automatic downloads: Turning off auto d/ls on your iTunes will save you some speed. You can do this by going to Settings > App and iTunes Stores and ticking off all the options for “Music,” “Apps,” “Books” and “Updates.”
7. Restart your phone: Nowadays you smartphone is just a mini computer, and what do you do when your computer start going at snail pace? Restart it. Same idea here. Either hold down the top button and reset it that way or do a hard reset by holding down the top and Home buttons simultaneously until the white Apple screen comes on (about 10 seconds).
8. Turn off automatic Wi-Fi: By not allowing your Wi-Fi to auto-latch onto available networks, you will also improve your phone’s speed by a bit. You can do this by going to Settings > Wi-Fi and turning on “Ask to Join Networks.”
9. Keep everything up to date: Running the latest versions of software and apps generally not only helps keep your phone safe (since a lot of times, these updates fix bugs and security gaps), but will also speed you up. You can check for app updates at the App Store by tapping on the “Updates” section on the bottom right. For iOS updates, you can find them in Settings > General > Software Update.
Do you have any other tips for improving speed? Tell us in the comments below!
(h/t Tech Insider)