It’s been a while since you last seen your Android phone in its full speed and performance? You miss these good ol’ days when your device was running quick and in his best performance! Unfortunately, after a certain amount of time your Android device might slow down, with lagging animations, long app starts, overall performance lost etc…

If we were you, we wouldn’t run to the next shop to get a new device. We’d rather try to optimise our Android for performance first, and see how much we can get out of our old phone.

In this article we will show you a few methods, how you can speed up your old Android phone or tablet or even a completely new one. In the same process we clean up your device by removing unused apps in the right way.

Check your battery stats for apps that slowing down your device

There are some apps out there that require a disproportionate amount of your CPU power to keep them running. The easiest way to find them is to have a quick look at your battery usage stats. To do that, visit your Android Settings > Battery > Usage (might vary depending on your manufacturer, but you get the idea).

Do you see any apps that consume a suspicious amount of your battery? If yes, they will also likely contribute to the fact that your Android device is running slow.

Turn off Android bloatware

Lots of Android device come with tons of useless apps pre-installed, straight out of the factory. Sometimes the manufacturer will pack your phone with “experience enhancing” apps, but it’s mostly the carriers like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile who load up your phone with bloatware.

We can tell you from experience that bloatware is not only affecting the speed and performance of your device, but they also drain the heck out of your battery. A great app we found to identify these nasty apps is “Package Disabler Pro”, that identifies them for you and lets you disable them manually.

Once installed and opened, you will see a long list of Android services. The ones marked purple are “optional”. For example, if you’re on At&T, you will see a series of services starting with ATT, meaning that they’ve been installed by the carrier. Most of the time the service name has the function in its name, so you can pick and choose what you want to keep enabled and what you want to get turned off.

In our post on how to increase your Samsung Galaxy S6 battery life we listed the apps that we have disabled on our own devices, so you can go ahead and check it out. In the post you will also see that we’ve disabled apps such as S Health and S Voice, simply for the reason that we don’t use them on a daily basis.

Download to Package Disabler Pro

Hard reboot your Android

Have you tried simply turning it off and on again?

Sometimes a good ol’ hard reboot will help you fix some lag and performance issues on your Android device. FYI, the “hard” in hard reboot stands for “hardware”, meaning that you will reboot your device using hardware.

If you have a removable battery, you can take it out for a minute, put it back into its place and start the device. If you don’t have a removable battery, you can emulate the same process by holding your Power and Volume Down buttons simultaneously until the device restarts.

Disable location services on your device

Your phone is already slow enough, so we will try our hardest to reduce the amount of CPU power required. One process, which requires a wide range of services, is your location tracker.

If you don’t need your device to track your location at all times, it might be a good idea to disable them altogether. This will save your device a lot of CPU power and it will run smoother and faster.

Get Greenify on your Android to send apps to sleep

While we’re on the topic of Battery Life and Performance, we would advice you to run Greenify. If you’re a non-rooted user, Greenify will let you choose apps that you want to “hibernate”. Pick and choose apps from the list of “potentially affecting performance” and put them to sleep.

If you do that, you will still be able to use them like you did before. The only difference is that they won’t run in the background and while your Android device is in sleep mode. Make sure to NOT disable instant messaging services and alarm clocks, otherwise you might miss important messages and alarms in the morning.

Download to Greenify

Delete unnecessary widgets from your home screen

Every time you unlock your Android, most of the widgets on your home screen will try to refresh themselves. In most cases this action requires your CPU to work hard. Especially if it comes to widgets for news apps that will try to access the internet to pull new content.

If you see any widgets on your home screen that you can live without – remove them (long-press and drag to the top part of your screen or press Delete).

Remove apps you never use

If you’re anything like us, you have quite a large collection of apps that you downloaded on an impulse: cool app here, useful app there… One app at a time your list grows and grows. Truth is though, that you won’t use all of them, and, likely, forget to uninstall them from your Android device altogether.

If you go through your App Drawer, you will quickly see some apps that you have no use for or don’t even recollect why exactly you installed them. So, go ahead and remove them from your device.

Other apps, however, might seem worthy enough to keep them installed. Don’t be fooled by your first instinct thought. Ironically enough, there’s an app that tells you exactly what apps you don’t use, even if they seem great.

To see what apps you don’t use on a continuous basis and are ready to be installed, go ahead and download Unused App Remover. This app will not only allow you to uninstall apps in bulk, but will also tell you when you have used a certain app the last time (data collection starts as soon as you install the app).

Download to Unused App Remover

Move media and apps to your SD card

Lots of users report that their devices start running slowly as soon as their system storage gets close to its limits. To avoid running out of space on your Android phone you have two options: move stuff to the cloud or move stuff to your SD card if you’re lucky enough to have a micro SD card slot in your device.

Some of you might also have a large collection of pictures and videos that you might never look at again in the future, but still are too precious memories to be permanently deleted. If that’s the case for you, it might be a good idea to make a copy of your library on your computer using Android File Transfer or moving your collection to the cloud using services like Google Photos or Dropbox.

Factory reset your Android – your last possibility

Now that you did everything in your power to breathe some life into your slow Android phone and you’re still not satisfied, it might be time for the ultimate measure – the Factory Reset.

A Factory Reset will erase all your data and device settings back to the way it’s been when you first turned on the phone. Before you do a factory reset, make sure to back up all your data somewhere, especially when it comes to contact or photos. And SD card is the best place for media, otherwise just use Android File Transfer to move the data you need to your computer. As for your contacts, they will likely be synced to your Google account, but, just to be careful, make sure to have contacts sync enabled on your device by visiting Settings > Accounts > Google > Sync Options.

More Ideas on How to bring your slow Android phone back to life?

Please let us know in the comment section, if you have any other tips and tricks on how to make your Android Device faster or if we missed something. Your feedback is very much appreciated, and we will make sure to update the article with the most useful information.