Android Phone Running Slow? 6 Reasons Why Smartphones Become Slower with Time

Smartphones start running slow after a while with regular use. Though the phone is fast and responsive while buying, it lags every time you unlock it or try to open an app. Within a few months you notice that you have spent a lot of time waiting just for your phone to respond. Are you unsure what makes your smart phone slow, and what you can do to make it run fast as a new phone? Read on.

What makes android phone slow?

Your phone starts running slow because the system cannot use all the resources that your phone has. Here are a few reasons why your phone might be running slow. You can decide yourself what might be the reason and correct it yourself.

1. Low Storage Space

When your phone's space is filled with photos, videos, music  there is no space left for the system to run properly. Your phone's system needs some space (>500MB space) to run properly. Also the apps that you transfer from your friends or download from the internet are saved in your phone even after installing it. Those apk files take up huge space and fill up your phone.

The installed apps also take up space in your phone because most of the apps are installed in your phone's storage instead of external SD card. 

2. Too Many Apps

Installing too many apps in your phone also makes your phone slow. Most of the apps that you install run in the background so they use all the resources that your phone has. They use your phone's processing power, RAM and battery in the background. Some apps even connect to the internet in the background and consume more battery. When too many apps are running in the background your phone's system does not get required amount of processing power and RAM to run smoothly. Bigger screens need more RAM and processing power to run.

For example, you have a phone with 1.5GHz processor and 2GB of RAM and there are ten apps that run in the background. Each app needs some processing power, say 0.1GHz processor speed and 150MB of RAM. That means your phone will now only have 0.5GHz of processing power and 512MB of RAM left. Hence your phone will start to slow down. 

Even though you clear the apps from "Recents" menu, most of the apps are running in the background. In most of the cases this is the main reason for a slow phone.

3. Damaged Battery

Your phone might run slow if the battery is not in proper condition. Irregular charging and keeping phone in low charge mode for a long time damages the battery power. If the battery is not functioning properly, it cannot power the phone like it did when it was new. That leads to slow performance of the phone and all the installed apps.

4. Display Settings

Your phone's display uses most of the power. If you have enabled live wallpapers or animations enabled in your phone the phone runs slower. That is because the phone has to run those animations when you are using the phone for other tasks. Just like the background apps, animations and live wallpaper eat up your phone's processing power. Other settings like using custom fonts may impact the phone's performance because the software was mainly design to handle the built-in fonts.

5. Widgets and Notifications

Widgets are also called "mini-apps" which you can keep in your home screen. They constantly update their data and run in the background for that purpose. For example, if you use a widget for clock app, the app needs to run in the background and update the time. A news app widget will fetch latest news from the internet and display in the widget. So the background process will eat up RAM and processing power of your phone, hence the phone becomes slow. Just like widgets, the notification that run for ever and updates every while also decreases the performance of your phone.

6. Weather Conditions

You may not believe this but how good your phone's performance is depends on the weather condition. Your phone might run very slow in extremely hot or extremely cold weather. Phones are designed to work best in room temperature. There is nothing you can do about it but you can be careful not to leave your phone exposing to direct sunlight or outdoors in the cold especially while charging.

Now that you have learned what makes your phone slow, it's time to decide. Which of the above reasons do you think applies to you the most? Don't worry; you can fix all the problems and make your phone super fast. Stay tuned for our next article about making your phone super fast!