Why Your Phone Is Slow and What to Do About It

Wondering why your phone is so slow? We've all been there.

But don't be so quick to buy a new phone. Take some time to follow these tips for speeding up your phone, most of which are quick and easy to complete, often showing results immediately.

How to Fix Your Slow Phone

There are lots of ways to speed up your phone because there are several possible reasons your phone is slow. These steps will walk you through all the solutions that have worked for us.

1. Reboot your Android or restart your iPhone. That might do the trick if you haven’t restarted your phone in a while. It’s always a good idea to give this a try before looking into other possibilities as it can fix all kinds of performance issues.

2. Check the Wi-Fi signal strength. It's easy to mistake a slow internet connection for a slow phone.

   If music and videos take forever to load but the apps themselves open quickly, then this is likely why your phone feels slow.
   

   If turning off Wi-Fi (i.e., switching to mobile internet) makes your phone faster, it's clear that it's slow because of your Wi-Fi connection. Troubleshoot your slow internet to fix it.

3. Update your Android or update your iPhone. A new major operating system is released each year and various updates are pushed to your phone throughout the year. These often contain fixes for problems that could cause a slow phone.

4. Check for Android app updates or updates to iOS apps. For apps that you do use, make sure they’re up to date. As with OS updates, app updates often contain bug fixes that can cause performance issues.

5. Delete Android apps or delete iPhone apps that you don’t use anymore or that take up the most space. Phones can become slow if there is too little free space available.

   If you can't find things to remove, consider offloading some of your files to a free cloud storage service. This movies music, documents, and other data to an account that lives online but that is still accessible from your phone.

6. Clear the Android cache or iPhone cache. Cached data is useful, but not always. Over time, it can become cluttered or corrupt and make your phone slow.

   If this is why your phone is slow, you should see an improvement immediately!

7. Reset your Android or reset your iPhone. If nothing else works, a factory reset is the next best method for resetting all the software on your phone.

   A factory reset deletes everything on the phone and restores the original software. This means all your apps will disappear unless you back up your phone first.

8. Contact tech support. If your phone is still slow after a factory reset, it’s time to get outside help. You could be looking at a hardware issue.

   For Android phones, contact your carrier or manufacturer; iPhone users can make a Genius Bar appointment.

9. Consider upgrading to a new phone. Especially if your phone is several years old, a newer model will likely support the latest OS updates (bug fixes and security updates are essential) and will be less used than your current phone.

Why Is My Phone Slow?

There are lots of reasons phones slow down. This usually happens naturally over time as you add apps and other files to it, but your phone can also become slow seemingly randomly.

Here are the most common reasons:

• Slow internet connection
• Outdated software (unfixed bugs)
• Power-hungry apps
• Low storage
• Faulty files in an app cache
• Failing hardware