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Why is my iPhone so slow?
Using a new phone is awesome. That initial fast and sleek performance, handling apps that your old phone would have died trying to open, can’t be beaten.
Over time, though, phones can slow down quite significantly. Here are a couple of potential reasons…
It’s old
Like people, iPhones get slower with age. They ain’t the young whippersnappers they used to be: it takes them longer to open apps, they don’t run games as well and…well, they’re just a little more sluggish than they used to be.
It’s not their fault. Memory fills up over time and new apps and even operating systems demand more power than they can provide.
It happens. Your best bet is to sell it now before it goes the way of the Nokia 3210.
You’ve got too many apps
If your phone’s storage is nearly full, you’ll probably experience some lag and performance issues.
One quick way to free up storage is to delete any apps you don’t use anymore. We’ve all got them: the fad games, the flash in the pan fitness apps, the productivity apps when we were going to get our life together.
Bid farewell and enjoy much improved performance.
You’ve got too many pictures and too much music
Alternatively, you can delete some old photo, videos and music.
This is a little harder because photos and videos have sentimental value. However, there are some quick wins: photo outtakes, blurry videos from concerts, embarrassing selfies – that kind of thing. Deleting them will free up some space immediately.
As for music, the choice is yours. Thanks to the cloud and the ease of downloading music to a device, most people don’t need their entire music library on their phone anymore. If there’s anything you haven’t listened to recently, delete it.
You’ve got too many messages
Yep, messages fill up your memory too.
Unless you really want to keep all the messages you’ve sent asking where people are or chatting random nonsense, deleting your messages is a quick and easy way to win back some storage space.
You can save the important or sentimental ones, of course.
You’ve got too many animations
iOS includes lots of pretty little animations that make navigating around your device look cooler, like parallax scrolling and special icons.
These animations can take their toll on the performance of your device, however. The good news is they aren’t essential and are easy to deactivate too.
Just go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion. Here, you can disable animations and hopefully speed up your phone’s performance.
You’ve got a full cache
Safari stores cached pages and cookies as you browse, which eats up memory.
Clearing your history and cache is super easy. Just go to Settings > Safari > Clear History and Website Data and it’s done! You might find that pages load faster afterwards.
You’ve got Background App Refresh active
A lot of apps run in the background, gathering info on your location or loading new content. All of these activities require memory, which slows your phone down.
You can disable these background processes by going to Settings > General > Background App Refresh.
Be warned that this will disable push notifications and apps may load slightly slower when you open them, but it’s worth it if your phone is really underperforming.
You need to upgrade
Apple optimize each version of iOS so that it runs faster and smoother.
If you’ve got a newer iOS device and you haven’t upgraded, give it a try and see if it works.
However, if you’re running an older device, it might be better to hold off; iOS 9 has noted issues on the iPhone 4s, as does iOS 8.
You need to get it fixed
If none of the solutions in this post have helped, there may be something wrong with the hardware. Book an appointment at your local Apple Store and have it looked over.
If your phone is running slow and you want to upgrade, head on over to our Sell My iPhone page on Decluttr! It’s fast, easy and FREE: get an instant price, ship it for FREE and we’ll pay you the day after it arrives. No iPhone? Check out the Sell My Phone page instead and find the phone you wish to trade in with us!
